What makes charlie a wallflower

However, despite your intellectual ability, this can contribute. The Perks of Being A Wallflower is a book about the changes teens go through as they mature and the obstacles they face during this time.

Charlie comes across changes in his relationships, his own stance in his family, school, and friends, and how he thinks of himself. He learns about his past and makes changes towards how he thinks about himself and why he is who he is. 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. After falling out with his friends because of his mistake with Mary Elizabeth, Charlie became even more depressed than he was before Sam and Patrick.

He turned to smoking as a way to grieve at the loss of his friends and the loss of his previous life. Charlie becomes ever out of it. When his sister needs him to drive her to the abortion clinic, he feels important and depended on and as he reported this was the first he felt needed. What if they need the arms or something like that?

You can't just sit there and put everybody's lives ahead of yours and think that counts as love. You just can't. You have to do things. But I wasn't talking to Sam anymore. I was talking to someone else. When I fell asleep, I had this dream. My brother and my sister and I were watching television with my Aunt Helen. Everything was in slow motion. The sound was thick. And she was doing what Sam was doing. That's when I woke up. And I didn't know what the hell was going on. It's like if I blamed my aunt Helen, I would have to blame her dad for hitting her and the friend of the family that fooled around with her when she was little.

And the person that fooled around with him. And God for not stopping all this and things that are much worse. And I did do that for a while, but then I just couldn't anymore. Because it wasn't going anywhere.

Because it wasn't the point. I guess we are who we are for a lot of reasons. And maybe we'll never know most of them. But even if we don't have the power to choose where we come from, we can still choose where we go from there.

We can still do things. And we can try to feel okay about them. But mostly, I was crying because I was suddenly very aware of the fact that it was me standing up in that tunnel with the wind over my face. Not caring if I saw downtown. Not even thinking about it.

Because I was standing in the tunnel. And I was really there. And that was enough to make me feel infinite. The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Plot Summary. Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Epilogue. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does. Detailed explanations, analysis, and citation info for every important quote on LitCharts.

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Charlie, the protagonist of the novel, tells the story of his first year of high school through writing letters to an anonymous friend. In his letters, Charlie is sensitive, observant, curious, reflective, and deeply lonely, feeling like an outsider even within his own family. As a child, Charlie was molested by his Aunt Helen , who was his favorite person in the world. She died while driving to buy him a birthday present on his 7th birthday, and Charlie feels at least partially to blame for her death.

Important Quotes Explained. Book Full Book Quiz. Mini Essays Suggested Essay Topics. Characters Charlie. During a session, the guidance counselor suggested that maybe Michael had no one to talk to and felt alone, leading to his assumed death of "suicide" and Charlie proceeded to cry and scream, saying that he could have talked to him.

They were unable to control him and had to call his older brother to pick him up. From that day on for the rest of the school year, the teachers have treated him differently; they gave him better grades, even though Charlie observed that he didn't get any smarter.

At home, Charlie noticed that his family left him alone because he started getting straight A's in school. Charlie starts high school as a freshman and continues to cope with Michael's suicide. When his relationships becomes stronger with Patrick , Sam , and others, he is able to get better.

Charlie's older brother, who is in college, is an international football hopeful. He is recognized by many in his old high school as a true leader due to leading the school's team to nationals and so on. Charlie's relationship with his brother is close as Charlie mentions throughout the book how he cannot wait for his brother to come home numerous times. Charlie's sister attends high school with Charlie as a senior.

She has long dark hair with fair skin and is notably very pretty though she doesn't see herself that way and calls herself fat many times. She is known to be dating Ponytail Derick as told by Patrick but is soon forced to breakup with him by her parents because he hit her and Charlie witnessed it. She secretly dates him until she gets pregnant and breaks off the relationship.