An End-of-Year Post on The Perks of Being a Wallflower: My Favorite Book

 

About a year ago today, for the subbie year Banned Book project, I read a book called The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. There are a lot of things I could say to introduce this book, but I think that alone would turn out to be a paragraph or fifty. So, to start without getting carried away: I've saved it until last for a reason.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a book that follows a highschooler named Charlie– who is introverted, extraordinarily awkward, and struggling mentally. As he speaks to the reader, it’s revealed slowly that he has been this way for a very long time, and has little hope of recovering. Despite his clear intelligence and capability, he was held back the previous year of school due to the sheer number of absences he had, and thus was starting high school one year late. This only further ostracized him from the few acquaintances he had, However, when he finally meets a group of people who care about him, they offer a chance to pull him from the ditch that he has been trapped in for years.

Unfortunately, as kind as those friends are to Charlie, it puts a great deal of eyes on him that he is not used to at all. I enjoy that the book does not paint Charlie to be a soft, emotional, innocent baby— because honestly, after everything he's been through, he's anything but. In a large deal of media, there is a strange phenomenon called the “perfect victim fallacy”, where the victim in question has never done anything wrong as a result of their trauma, and is actively doing everything “right” to make things better. The thing is, actual victims of traumatic events are almost never like this, and their experiences are often invalidated by those who believe in this fallacy because they do not fit the perfect, innocent mold of how the fallacy believes “true” victims should act. In Charlie’s case, I think the reason behind this issue is heavily implied to be correlated with neurodivergence— which may have been why it was so impactful to me, a neurodivergent person, for such a specific and isolating experience to be put into words by a character who knowingly struggles with words. 

What stood out to me in particular, as well as what led to this theory, was the very unique writing style. Charlie narrates directly to the reader throughout the story; the book itself being a compilation of letters and diary entries that he has written. Around the beginning of the book, Charlie's way of writing is very robotic and rigid, which I see as a reflection of who he believed he was. Charlie saw himself as nothing more than a robotic, soulless being without personality, which disallowed the prospect of ever being anything more. But as he found himself through the events that happen in the story, his tone becomes more confident; more colorful. This growth from a character shown in such a subtle, wordless way is one of my favorite parts of the entire book, and in a strange way made me proud of Charlie as if he was a real person developing those opinions and emotions. Because Charlie did not know how to treat people, he lost friends. Because he didn't know how to reciprocate affection, he was often left behind. His actions, even though they were done without malice, still had very real consequences. But unlike what he would have done at the beginning of the story, he does not use that as an excuse to isolate himself once again— instead, he promises both to those that he has hurt and himself (which may be one and the same) that he can and will become a person not shackled by the confines of his fears.

In the time it took me to finish reading the novel, the majority of it went into reading the ending. It is incredibly bittersweet, and Charlie's future is left up to interpretation rather than blatantly said; as even he doesn't know what he is going to do next. At the end of the story, Charlie writes to the reader one last time: stating that he no longer feels he has a reason to pour his heart out to a stranger that he has never met nor heard a response from. He admits his uncertainty of if he will ever become who he truly wishes to be, but says that no matter what happens, even if things get worse again, one thing will be different from every time it has happened last.

He will be able to look back, knowing that he has tried, and he is trying, and he always will.

“This one moment where you know you're not a sad story, you are alive. And you stand up and see the lights on buildings and everything that makes you wonder, when you were listening to that song on that drive with the people you love most in this world.

“And in this moment, I swear, we are infinite.”

Happy summer break!

-Livy