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- Perks ofBeing aWallflower
- In Perks of Being a Wallflower, the theme I found was that the friends in one’s life can greatly influence who they choose to be.
- I’ll do anything for Sam and Patrick
- When Charlie first gets to highschool, he is withoutfriends since he has always been seen as the weird, quiet kid, butthen he meets Patrick and Sam who quickly take him under theirwing and give him a highschool experience.These friends quickly become Charlie’severything, and he begins to let himself be carried with them and do whatever they do. In the scene where they are driving through the tunnel, and the music is playing, and he is with his new bestfreinds, Charlie says, “In that moment, I swear we were infinite.” (Chbosky, 39)This shows how good his friends make him feel, which could haveled more into how willing he was to do whatever they wanted, inaddition to him already being a person who would allow others tocontrol his life. Sam and Patrick have many positive benefits toCharlie, as Charlie’s thought shows, but later in the book theystart to become too much of an attachment that Charlie can’teffectively function without since he has based too much ofhis life off of them being there.
- The small suburban neighborhood that Charlie lives insounds like it is on the edge of a larger city, with a rougherpopulation of drug users which would influence the highschool population that Charlie is exposed to who seem tohave easy access to drugs and alcohol when they shouldn’t. This setting makes it even harder for Charlie later in the book because he is such a pushover that he can be convinced into doing about anything that someone asks of him, and when he gets into his hard times, the bad substances he uses are in ready supply to further complicate his situation. On his journey tofind himself thoughout the book, he is seen to turn to drug use to try and numb himself to the pain of living the life of awallflower and not really living in his own world, a problem added to a problem that was made more accessible by theplace he lives in.
- During Charlie’s freshman year experience, there were several instances where he was in conflict with individual problems, but the overall conflict that was often the source of the numerous smaller problems was himself, and his wallflowerpersonality. As Charlie said, his solution to most problems is, “…just…avoiding everything.”(Chbosky, 142) For example, when he was in his relationship with Mary Elizabeth, the cause of one of the biggest low points in Charlie’s letters was his choice to kiss Sam over Mary Elizabeth in the face of wanting to be honest to everyone. It was nice that he wanted to be honest, but clearly he couldn’t see the social cues that he was supposed to kiss Mary Elizabeth and save his true opinion for a time when it would be more fitting. This caused a spiral of events that caused Charlie to become even more of his own enemy in the sense that he doesn’t know how to survive without the influence of his friends around him and turned to using drugs and smoking to try and make his pain go away.
- At the end of the book, when Charlie is helping Sam pack her things, Sam confronts him and asks, “The point is that I don’t think you would have acted different… Did you want him to kiss you?”(Chbosky, 201) and to which Charlie shakes his head no, indicating he did not want Patrick to have kissed him even though he willingly let him because it is what he thought Patrick needed from him. Over the course of the book Charlie became more and more attached to his friends, and also became more and more susceptible to do anything they asked of him and to completely break down mentally when they weren’t there to tell him what to do. This development of actually needing these people to show him how to live his own life hit Charlie hard several times when he was in situations without his friends there to guide him and make his decisions. In this way, his friends had a very negative effect on his overall personal development. Sam was probably the one person in the book who, by the end, helped him to realize his situation by helping him dig himself out of his hole of self-loathing and telling him exactly why he needed to change himself so that he could actually be himself. Over the course of his freshmen year, Charlie experiences a lot through his friends, but by the end, I think he was able to realize what it takes to be his own person while still having friends there to support him.
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