Perks Of Being A Wallflower Theme Essay

‘The Perks of Being a Wallflower’ follows shy and kind-natured Charlie Kelmeckis (Logan Lerman- Percy Jackson, The Butterfly Effect) as he enters high school alone, after the recent loss of his middle school best friend to suicide. Charlie gets befriended by seniors Sam (Emma Watson- Harry Potter-Beauty and the Beast) and Patrick (Ezra Miller- Justice League, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them) and finally feels accepted.

The Perks of being a Wildflower movie is a great demonstration on adolescence and childhood development as it portrays how much we as humans are effected by our early childhood years and how we struggle to make sense of life while navigating through adolescence. We are molded by our environment, but also shaped by the neglect or abuse we suffer as children. The traumatic experiences are life altering and if not dealt with can have dramatic outcomes for our future. The movie has a great story line and walks the audience through the character and identity development of an adolescence. Dissecting Charlies character will be helpful in understanding that part of a human’s life and development.

For my paper, I am diagnosing Charlie from the film, Perks of Being a Wallflower. Before I delve into Charlie’s diagnosis, I will provide some background information about his character. In the film, Charlie is a 15 year old boy who has recently started high school as a freshman. He lives with both parents, and his sister who is a couple years older than him. Charlie also has a brother who has gone away to college. In school, Charlie is seen to be good with academics, particularly in English, since he has an interest in writing. However, Charlie does not have any friends and his best friend had kill himself in the last year. Furthermore, Charlie is seen to be quite socially awkward around his peers and usually keeps to himself.

As a result, Charlie grows cold and arrogant, destroying his previously happy relationships with everybody except Algernon and Alice Kinnigan, two relationships that were insufficient in keeping Charlie

Charlie’s friends even take advantage of how nice he is. They always make him the root of their jokes. When Charlie asks a barber shop owner to move his illegally parked car, the owner laughs at him and just throws him the keys to the car and tells him to move it himself. The whole town takes advantage of Charlie though, not only his friends. In the supermarket a woman asks to cut in front of him inline and then ends up having a cart full of groceries. This is Charlies breaking point. He starts tensing up, you can tell something is happening. All of a sudden he starts talking in a different voice, and finds vagaclean in the woman’s cart that cut in front of him. So to take his anger out on her he gets on the store microphone and announces she has vagaclean in her cart. We learn this new personalities name when he is drowning a young girl in the water fountain who disobeyed him earlier. When the girl says she is going to tell her father on him, he announces that he is Hank. After this change in personality he starts going

Many interactions were changed between him and his sister, dubbed Candace in the movie. In the book of Perks of Being a Wallflower Charlie's sister becomes pregnant. Charlie is the only one who she confides in and he takes her to a clinic to get an abortion. Sharing this secret really characterized the relationship between the two in the book but was left out of the movie. The movie did add however a different moment between the two of them, except the roles were reversed and Charlie was the one in need.

At the beginning, Charlie is without friends and is rather alone. He is very gifted and quite an overthinker which expels him from the usual teenage social groups. This changes, however, when he meets Sam and Patrick at a football game. They expose him to all new experiences. Resulting from his new friendships, is his relationship with Mary Elizabeth, his experimentations with drugs, and new knowledge of being a person. During this time, he is increasingly happy because Charlie was finally living.

Charlie later befriends two seniors named Patrick and Sam, however, Charlie then quickly develops a crush on Sam who Charlie later finds out that she was sexually abused as a child (Wikipedia).

We get to know Charlie through letters he writes to the unnamed “friend”. Charlie has a lot of internal conflicts which he deals with every second of his life. He deals with his best friend’s death and his aunt’s death and his past with his aunt. These internal conflicts make him withdrawn. Moreover, Charlie has a need to tell someone about his life and thoughts, maybe to feel less lonely. In the very start of the story Charlie expresses: “I don’t want you to find me”, which emphasizes that he does not want a concrete person to help him, he only needs to let his thoughts out. Charlie is absolutely a dynamic and round character. He is an intelligent, observant high school freshman who hides his beautiful personality because of having dealt with a lot of trauma in his childhood. Through the relationships he develops over the course of the school year, Charlie suddenly comes out of his shell and grows as a person. For example, what he tells Sam who has also dealt with a troubled past: “Even if we don’t have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there”. However, it is not until the very end of the book that he uncovers the repressed memories of sexual abuse of his aunt that are at the foundation of his internal

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a coming of age film about a 15 year old boy, Charlie, who has been through much trauma. As a freshman Charlie is left with no friends, because of the suicide of his best friend Michael, but he has the support of an english teacher who inspires his dreams of becoming a writer. Eventually, step-siblings Sam and Patrick discover that Charlie is lonely and in need of a friend, so they take him under their wing. Sam, Patrick, and their group of friends have much wisdom about life, because they are older, much of which they share with Charlie. Under the wing of Sam and Patrick, Charlie becomes more excited about life. Although, he still struggles with the side effects of past traumas, and dreads the day his new friends leave for their lives after high school.

Sam is a love interest of Charlie's, but he is soon shot down because "He's too young for her." and "She doesn't want him to waste his time thinking of her like that." He learns that Patrick is homosexual and later finds out he is dating the quaterback, Brad. Throughout the sequence of letters you learn about Charlie's family and his past. He

Charlie, the main character in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, tells his story through a series of letters written over a span of one year, or Charlie’s freshman year of high school. Author Stephen Chbosky, tells the story of a young man trying to find his way and also trying to make friends in school. Along the way, Charlie has trials he must go through, and not everything results in a happy ending right away. Eventually, all is well in Charlie’s life, but he must struggle in order to finally be content and happy with his life. Charlie’s coming of age story is told through his trials of trying to fit in by going to parties, drinking and even doing drugs while many of his relationships are hurt in the process. Just as every other high school student, Charlie wants to feel like he belongs, even if that means becoming someone that he is not. Along the way, not only is Charlie hurt, but also his friends Sam and Patrick. The relationships with these two friends, and Charlie himself are tested by all of their actions and how they live their lives.

In the beginning, Charlie is getting over the suicide of his best friend Michael. When he starts high school, he has a hard time making friends. Things change for Charlie when he enters high school and meet his best friends Patrick and Sam. Charlie solves his internal conflict by experiencing new things and finding out who he is. Characters: .

Charlie begins to hang out with Sam and Patrick and is getting in the routine of going to football games and then going out afterwards to celebrate. Afterwhile he catches feelings for Sam and the way he expresses them further deepens our understanding of his depression. Instead of going with the flow and not telling her about the dreams he had about her, he professes his love for her in the form of sharing his dreams and telling her just how he feels. Perhaps, this isn’t all his fault because when Sam tells him that she’s too old for him, he becomes obsessed with his love for her and can’t stop thinking about how perfect she is in his eyes. The only thing this confession has done for him is make his feelings grow and send him in a downward spiral of

In the film The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the main character, Charlie, struggles with depression and anxiety as a result of his post traumatic stress disorder. Charlie enters freshman year and has a difficult time meeting people, but a group of seniors become his friends and help him learn more about himself and the world. They take him to parties and give him the high school experience he always wanted.