A Quite Quidditative Quote

In Stephen Chbosky's Perks of Being a Wallflower, Charlie, the main character, has experienced many things throughout his life that have left him feeling completely invisible and abandoned. Feeling helplessly alone, Charlie resorts to writing multiple anonymous letters, sending them to unidentified receivers to express his day-to-day emotions. At one point in the story, Charlie describes his reoccurring and paralyzing feeling by saying, "It's kind of like when you look at yourself in the mirror and you say your name. And it gets to a point where none of it seems real. Well, sometimes, I can do that, but I don't need an hour in front of a mirror. It just happens very fast, and things start to slip away. And I just open my eyes, and I see nothing. And then I start to breathe really hard trying to see something, but I can't. It doesn't happen all the time, but when it does, it scares me." This particular quote ties the entire story together perfectly, by allowing the reader to better understand the way Charlie felt after everything he went through in his life. Giving an example of a way the person reading the story could actually attempt to feel the way Charlie feels is a great way to emphasize the tone of the entire story. Through each letter, Charlie tries to express his feelings in the best way possible, and in this case he did a wonderful job doing so. The way Stephen Chbosky depicts Charlie's feeling so precisely is meaningful to the reader, because everyone can at least partially relate to what he must be going through due to the implied tragedies. As the story unfolds, it is apparent that his best friend, Michael, had taken his life about a year before Charlie decided that writing letters would be a good coping mechanism for his feelings. Coming to terms with how he is truly feeling allows Charlie to deal with the loss much better than if he had just contained all of the emotions that resulted from his friend's death. It seems that the loss of Michael hit Charlie so hard because he was his best and only childhood friend. However, Michael's death was not the only time Charlie was exposed to losing someone close to him. The quote mentioned earlier is also related to the death of Charlie's aunt Helen. She was the most affectionate family member to Charlie, and throughout the story the reader gets the impression that they had an almost inseparable bond. Throughout the story, Charlie recounts many of the wonderful memories they had made together. He is even able to describe the day she passed with great and perfect detail. The great bond Charlie had with his aunt and his best friend is what makes it is so hard for him to accept their absence in his life. Everyone he is closest to leaves him so permanently. So, when he describes the feeling of everything uncontrollably slipping away from him resulting in him seeing nothing, it directly resembles the way he feels about his aunt and best friend slipping out of his life, leaving him with nothing but nothingness.