The Perks Of Being A Wallflower By Stephen Chbosky

The average American teenager has grown up in a world of labels and stereotypes: from movies depicting high school as an environment where exclusive friend groups command the school to magazines portraying flawless people and rendering them the paragon of beauty, American teenagers are constantly under pressure to conform to a certain label. The book The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky follows a boy named Charlie as he enters high school. His mental illness is apparent throughout the text, but it is never acknowledged until the very end of the book. The novel is a series of letters that he writes to an unknown recipient. His impartiality and honesty in his letters create an objective view of the events that unravel throughout the story. The Alan Review even describes the story as “one of the most honest literary portrayals of teenage life within the last decades” (Glenn). The high schoolers in The Perks of Being a Wallflower are submerged in a society where labels are prevalent: if one does not belong to a certain social group, they are deemed outcasts and ostracized by their peers. Charlie is lucky enough to have found friends in high school who accept him for who he is. Others are not so lucky, and are forced to change who they are in order to appease the societal pressures to conform. These individuals are left wondering who they really are, after years of pretending. The pressure students in high school face to fit a certain label and conform to the

In the English 110 class, we performed many tasks that are required to do in the class. The class also required us to read a book which was titled, The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. Reading the book was to help us write an essay about the book. We wrote many essays in the class also each essay was a different type of essay. In total in the class we wrote 4 essays on different subjects and with different methods of writing of the essay. Three of the four essay I selected because it showed the seven different outcomes that are for writing. The seven outcomes are process, revision, critical reading, rhetorical analysis and argumentation. Then the others are researching, quoting, paraphrasing, and documenting sources plus

Author of The Perks of a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky, mentions an important point when he says, “Banning books gives us silence when we need speech. It closes our ears when we need to listen. It makes us blind when we need sight.” Banning books has been a practice since 443 BC in Rome when Socrates was to drink poison because of “his corruption of youth and his acknowledgement of unorthodox divinities,” says Beacon for Freedom of Expression. Before a book can get to the point of being banned, it undergoes a process of being challenged. This is when a group of people or a person tries to restrict certain materials. When a challenge ends up being victorious, the book gets banned and removed. Some people believe that certain books are not ethically

High school is filled with fake people and stress. Students in high school often do not know what they are doing in relationships or how bad they can hurt another person. Lying, cheating, little communication, getting used for sex, drugs, or alcohol and what people continue to believe is real love. It is even harder while trying to make the people around you ecstatic and please your boyfriend/girlfriend. Navigating through the paroles of adolescents with someone that is guaranteed to break your heart in some way, shape, or form is laborious. In Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, the main character Charlie has to navigate all of this while trying to maintain new friendships, try new things, and find new relationships. As presented in the book Charlie is a wallflower. A wallflower is typically an introverted person. They might attend social gatherings, but will continue to remain silent. They see and understand. They feel lonely or shy all the time. As if no one ever see’s them. Also only have a few friends, just like Charlie. His 2 friends are Sam and Patrick. Patrick’s a senior, introducing Charlie to new people, new relationships, and giving him the whole high school experience. They all have something in common, they’re all involved foul relationships. Charlie and Mary Elizabeth, Brad and Patrick, and Sam and Craig. Chbosky displays insolent relationships throughout the book using young adolescent relationships in Perks that are unfair because the people in

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

Everyone has issues especially when it comes to an individual. There is always a reason why a human being act the way they act. In the book, The Perks of Being a Wallflower by, Stephen Chbosky, the main character Charlie has many reasons that lead him to go to the psychiatrist. Charlie deals a lot with with issues that also involve other situations in it and he blames himself for all of that. As a result, readers can see that unresolved issues sends an individual to insanity.

A quote from The Perks of Being a Wallflower states, “Things change and friends leave. Life doesn’t stop for anyone…” The setting of this book is school, a place where students should feel safe and protected. However this is not the case for most students attending school. Division from groups in schools are causing a social monarchy to form inside the school.

The first heartbreak I ever had was not even one of my own. I let words and sentences from a love story run through my blood, and to my heart, where it then cracked, fell apart, and possibly stopped beating for a while. I laid in bed for days. Perks of Being a Wallflower, why did you do this to me? I realized everyone has their own personality when it comes to reading. My reading disposition holds a deep sense of empathy. Because of this, in every story I read, I transform into any character I (sometimes) choose to be. I then experience the story more heavily since I am apart of it. I have learned that the trait of empathy can send you down a tunnel of agonizing pain that does not even belong to you, or it can put you on someone else’s

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is the story of a unique high school student named Charlie and his journey of self-discovery throughout his freshman year. Charlie’s personality changes drastically from the beginning of the book to the end of it; and this is what I want to focus on. First I am going to detail Charlie’s personality at the beginning of the book and then use Erik Erikson’s theory of Psychosocial Development, Kohlberg’s theory of Moral Development, Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development and an article about adolescent bulling to analyze them. I will then use examples from the book and film to illustrate his growth in the respected areas. Through these major theories of psychology I will show Charlie’s evolution from a wallflower to a human being.

15 year old Charlie is starting his first year of high school. Charlie’s friend Michael had just committed suicide and Charlie was not looking forward to high school without him.

According to Charlie Kelmeckis "we are who we are for a lot of reasons"(Chbosky 210). Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, is a charming coming-of-age tale centered around adolescence in the 1980s. Chbosky guides readers through an emotional hailstorm using the outlook of Charlie - a self-declared wallflower. In his novel, Chbosky captures the zeitgeist of the 1980s - in relation to teenagers - by describing common occurrences of the time such as premature sexual activity and abuse, drug use, depression, and sexuality. To give the book a more authentic setting, Chbosky develops the 1980s era using popular pop-culture references - television and music - as well as testimonials from Charlie concerning postmodern education systems,

Emotional Instability can develop into a mental illness and is most often caused by a traumatic event early in life. This can result in an individual growing up to have drastic mood swings without reason. Examples of these mood swings are lashing out, dangerous and reckless behavior, crying randomly, isolating oneself from society, and experimenting with alcohol and drugs. Stephen Chbosky’s novel, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, follows a socially awkward boy named Charlie entering high school after his only companion, Michael, commits suicide. Under those circumstances, it is evident that this experience has impacted Charlie because he often becomes overly aggressive or breaks down crying for no reason.

Sociology is the scientific study of being behavior in human groups (Schaefer). There are very many examples of sociology in the movie The Perks of Being a Wallflower, but I view alienation, deviance, and gender roles to be the most prominent. This movie is about the struggles of a teenage boy named Charlie’s freshman year of high school. Charlie is seen as a social outcast and he just barely makes it through the year with the help of his best friends Sam and Patrick. Throughout the movie Charlie experiences most of the basic struggles of starting high school and some. This movie is very relateable since it gives a more realistic view of high school for some people. Charlie , and the audience, learns the importance of love and friendship in growing up in today’s society.

As teens or young adults you are still trying to figure out who you are and what you have to offer the world. There is so much pressure around teen’s every day of their lives. They do not know what is the right or the wrong choice, but certain influences and relationships help determine the choices they make. They need guidance and someone they can talk to, like a non-parental adult. This is an adult who wants to make a difference in the life of teens, and is someone they can rely on for support. Non-parental adults can come from many different socially-defined contexts: Teachers, coaches, or extended family. These adults play a tremendous role in teens lives’, which is exemplified well in Bill, a male

To the average American teenager, high school may have seemed like a real-life nightmare. So why is it that so many movies today revolve around this hellish concept? According to David Denby, the author of “High-School Confidential: Notes on Teen Movies”, there is a whole genre of these teen films. As explained by Denby, such genre films include stereotypical male and female villains of the social queen or jock type, mixed up emotions and teens rising above the “poisonous system of status, snobbery and exclusion” that is commonly known as high school (Denby 367). By this definition, the film The Perks of Being a Wallflower can be categorized as a teen film.