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The Perks Of Being A Wallflower By Stephen Chbosky

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A modern book that holds a great deal of sentiment within it is Stephen Chbosky’s novel, The Perks of being a Wallflower. The novel is about a young boy, Charlie, who has some anxiety about beginning high school especially after recently losing his friend, Michael, and he beings to write letters to an anonymous person. Charlie eventually becomes best friends with Sam and Patrick and goes through a lot of challenging situations that year. He deals with bullies, relationship problems, secrets, parties, drugs, abortion, and friendship. Throughout the novel, it is sensed that there may be something mentally troubling Charlie based on his strange actions. By the end of the novel a repressed memory of his is revealed to him and this causes him …show more content…

Charlie doesn’t give his friend any clues as to who his real identity is and asks the friend to not write back to him but simply listen to his story. Having the novel be written in a series of letters makes the story more intimate for the reader versus if the narrator had chosen to tell his stories in a traditional first person point of view novel or as a diary. The narrator writes to the friend saying, “Even though I didn’t know you, I felt like I did because you sounded like such a good person… The kind of person who would understand how they were better than a diary because there is communion and a diary can be found” (206). A diary can always be found and read by another person but letters leave your presence as soon as you mail them and an intimacy between the sender and the receiver of the letter is made. Charlie writes these letters knowing that someone will read them and has the satisfaction of knowing that there’s a good person out there whom he can confide in when things are getting rough. In Bartleby the Scrivener, by Herman Melville, we meet Bartleby who is employed as a copyist and eventually stops doing his work because he says that he would prefer not to and stays in his office all day. Bartleby’s employer rids of Bartleby by moving his office to a new location, having Bartleby

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