Perks Of Being A Wallflower Essay Example

his first year in

high school to an unknown person. Charlie encounters the same struggles that

many kids have to face in high school - how to make friends, family tensions, a

first relationship, experimenting with drugs - but he also has to deal with his

best friend's recent suicide. With the help of a teacher who recognises his

intuition , and his two older friends, the seniors Patrick and Samantha, Charlie

begins to be contented with his life. Yet not for a long time - depressed when

all his friends prepare for college, Charlie has a catatonic breakdown, which

resolves itself neatly and reveals a long-repressed truth about his Aunt Helen.

Nevertheless, he makes it back in due time, ready to face his sophomore year and

all it may bring. 5. In this book there is not really a climax because Charlie

only tells about his life. Though there happen several important things that

change his life a lot. One of them is when Charlie's first relationship with

Mary-Elizabeth, a good friend of Sam, ends miserably because Charlie remains

compulsively honest about the fact that he truly loves Sam and not

Mary-Elizabeth. That hurts Mary-Elizabeth very much, and somehow the whole group

of his friends more or less does not want to see him for about one month. By the

time Charlie realises how he did Mary-Elizabeth wrong and endangered the

friendship of Sam and her. He starts to see how much his friends really mean to

him and how much he needs them. Charlie remembers the beginning of the year,

before he got to know Sam and Patrick, and how lonely he felt then - so lonely

that he started writing letters to an unknown person. He finds out what

friendship really means. That was

very impressing and I really could empathise

with Charlie. 6. The ending really took me by surprise. You could see from

Charlie's letters that he was emotionally unstable, yet I never thought he would

have such a breakdown and have to go to hospital for two months. 7. I think

Charlie was in some way like me. I did not dislike anyone of the characters,

they were all pretty sympathetic, I think. Charlie: Charlie is the third child

in a middle-class family. His older brother plays football at Penn State and his

older sister worries a lot about boys. Charlie attends high school, he is a

freshman and by no means popular. He is a shy boy, introverted and easily

influenced. Patrick and Sam think he is a wallflower. He is also very nave and

honest, which makes him a lot of problems later on. Charlie is a thinker, but he

thinks too much, which sometimes leads to confusion and anxiety. He feels guilty

about the death of his Aunt Helen, a troubled woman who lived with Charlie's

family at the time of her terrible car accident. Charlie begins the year at high

school as a friendless observer, but soon is friends with Sam and Patrick. He

proves a loyal friend to his gay friend Patrick, and a helping brother when his

sister needs an abortion. Sam and Patrick: Sam and Patrick are step-siblings who

include Charlie in their circle, where he smokes pot for the first time, tries

acid and falls madly in love with Sam. Sam is an 18-year-old girl who had to

face a lot of problems the last years in college. As Charlie's sister tells him,

she is not very self-confident and had several bad relationships in the past.

She really likes

Charlie a lot, but when he tells her at the beginning of their

friendship that he loves her, she just wants to be friends. In the end she

somehow falls in love with him, too, but then it is too late, as she is leaving

for college. Patrick, also a senior and Charlie's best friend, is gay and has a

relationship with Brad, a pretty popular footballer. As nobody is allowed to

know Brad is gay, he has to face lots of problems according to this relationship.