Realistic or Not? (The Perks of Being a Wallflower

There are a few real life problems that Charlie goes through in “The perks of being a wallflower” some being, mental health, addiction, and somewhat violence in sections of the novel. The author, Stephen Chbosky, portrayed the real world problems in a realistic way where it wasn’t so much of a stereotype of how every high school kid gets peer pressured into drugs, but something that Charlie went through considering the other problems that he struggled to deal with.

Mental Health, Charlie frequently goes to the doctors for them to do therapy tests on him to see what is making him get flashbacks, fainting and not remembering what happened before that. Further into the novel, it is told that one of Charlie’s flashbacks of Aunt Helen have deeply traumatized him since her death. The reason why I find this portrayed in a realistic way because of how we can relate it to our reality. I personally don’t know anyone who is traumatized but I’ve seen news articles of serial killers being abused as a child, traumatizing them and making them do things that the norm wouldn’t do.

Addiction, during the novel, Charlie gets into a heated situation with Mary Elizabeth after Charlie kissed Sam. Patrick then tells Charlie that he needs to take a break and he will let him know when everything is cooled off again. During this break period, Charlie gets very nervous with the feeling that he will maybe never talk or see his friends again due to something he did. Charlie began to use weed, along with smoking cigarettes during school breaks to help cope with the situation that he was going through. Personally, I think this is definitely a realistic representation of a real-life problem, but the things that people use to cope with things are always different, sometimes its television, and sometimes its snorting coke.

Violence, there isn’t much violence in this book but this one scene with the group fight involving Charlie, Patrick, Brad, and Brad’s friends, in this moment, Charlie is seen watching Patrick getting beat up by Brad’s friends when he decides to step in and defend him. I think violence wasn’t a good choice for me to use in this novel, what Charlie did to them definitely was violent, but in a realistic way point of view, I would say that what Charlie did in this scene, was self-defense.