The Environment

This blog log is supposed to be about the environment in the book. Maybe this seem to be easy, but it´s not. Because most of it are described between the lines and therefor the reader need to visualize it by its self.  Of course there are some environmental descriptions, but just a few. Here´s one of them:

“We are all sitting in Sam and Patrick´s house, which I had never seen before. It was a rich house. Very clean.”  (The perks of being a wallflower, 1999. Stephen Chabosky, p. 73)

This describes how Patrick and Sam live. It doesn´t tell so much, but it enough to get a picture of how it looks like. As the quote says it´s a rich and clean house, and from there a picture is build. It´s a big house with nice decorations and good furniture’s and so on. The brain builds a picture by its self in other words. But still it´s not much environmental descriptions!

Then why has Stephen Cabosky chosen it to be this way?  Why doesn’t he describe the environment detail by detail? That question actually leads to two answers. To begin with: He can´t. Why? Because in the beginning of the book Charlie says:

“I will call people by different names or generic names because I don´t want you to fins me. I didn´t enclose a return address for the same reason.” (The perks of being a wallflower, 1999. Stephen Chabosky, p. 8)

That shows that he doesn’t want to be found. If the environment were described in detail, maybe it would lead to that the person Charlie´s writing to would found out. Therefor the environment can´t be described in detail, because then Charlie would do something that could risk his alias.

Secondly: He don´t need to. If he would state up detail after detail, the book would be different. The book would lose track from Charlie. The book is about CHARLIE. It´s about his life his thoughts and what he does. It’s not about the society. It’s his thoughts about everything that’s important. It’s that that’s the book´s about. Therefor the environmental descriptions are unimportant.