The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

This book was exceptionally good...though it always amazes me, if you read people's booklists on Myspace, for example, that one usually sees both Catcher in the Rye and The Perks of Being A Wallflower on many of them...always together too.

Hmm...

"My bad. --Eve"

I agree with no buisness, the ending fit perfectly
Which explains the reason he is the "wallflower"
He loved his Aunt so much that he let her do whatever she wanted to do with him
And he loved his friends in the same way
The whole book he's asking for somebody to tell him what's wrong with him, and at the end Sam finally tells him that he has to do what HE wants

I thought it was a great book, and that the ending explained why he was the way he was.

I know this comes a little late from this discussion but I just finished reading the book and was doing some research on it and came across this forum.
I think the ending is completely neccessary to explain why Charlie is the way he is. It is an unfortunate experience for him and I think thats why as a reader I didnt want it to happen to the character but it explains so much. It explains why, as Bill explains, Charlie thinks so much about life that he doesnt participate.
I learned in one of my psychology classes that people who are molested as children tend to have more dissociative experiences (like out of body experiences,) .They can make things that are happening to them seem not real,or like a dream so they dont have to experience the bad thing of being molested and when they are molested often they dissociate often and it becomes a way of dealing with all undesirable situations. They do it so often that it becomes a way of life. That explains why he doesnt remember ever being molested until much later in life. It just ties everything about him together.
When I think about it, it's really not that shocking that his aunt would do something like that because molestation is cyclical, like charlie explains, it happened to the man who did it to his aunt , it also happend to the man who did it to that man... so it makes sense that she would do it to someone else. It is just unexpected she did it to him because he loved her so much.