The Perks Of Being A Wallflower Analysis

The Perks of Being A Wallflower is a novel by Stephen Chbosky about a teenage boy trying to make it through his first year of high school. Charlie is an emotionally unstable freshman. A few weeks into the school year, Charlie attends a home football game at his school, where he meets Patrick and Sam- a brother and sister (who are seniors) who will become Charlie’s best friends through the entire year. Through the novel, Charlie makes mistakes and faces difficult times. Throughout the book, Stephen Chbosky uses many different quotes and literary elements to showcase who Charlie is as a character and how he overcomes problems.
First off, the entirety of the novel is a series of letters that Charlie writes to a mystery reader. Charlie’s identity is hidden from the reader. He writes these letters to an address that his friend gave him to let out his
In the book, at Charlie’s first party Patrick says, ”’He’s a wallflower.’... And the whole room nodded their head… but Patrick didn’t let me get too nervous. He sat down next to me. ‘You see things. You keep quiet about them. And you understand.’ I didn’t know that other people thought things about me… And I started to cry. And nobody in that room looked at me weird for doing it” (Chbosky 37-38). By using this quote, Chbosky explains many things about Charlie; he is not the popular one, he is the one who sits in the back at dances and sees and understands everything happening. He is not the boy who shares drama he hears about. As Chbosky writes, Charlie is a wallflower.
Another characterization quote is when Charlie says early in the book, “And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be. I try to think of my family as a reason for me being this way” (Chbosky 2). This quote is very important in describing Charlie because it helps to prove Charlie’s