The Perks of Being a Wallflower: Epilogue Summary & Analysis

Charlie spends two months in the hospital after his family finds him naked, unresponsive, and looking at a blank television. He didn’t speak to anyone for a week. When he finally starts talking again, he answers a new doctor’s questions. Charlie says he doesn’t want to talk about the questions and his answers, but he explains that with this doctor’s help, he realizes that Aunt Helen molested him as a child every Saturday while they watched TV. He explains that the hardest thing for him was being in the room when the doctor told his parents that Aunt Helen molested him. His mother sobs, and his father looks extremely angry because they didn’t know. Charlie says that he likes his doctor, and she has helped him work through the stages of this experience.

Charlie’s family and friends visit him regularly, and his older brother even reads Charlie’s essay on Walden and tells him how much he liked it. His brother’s praise makes Charlie feel good. Charlie also talks about how Patrick treats him the same in the hospital and cracks jokes to make him feel better. Patrick and Sam promise to drive Charlie through the tunnel once he’s released. Bill and his girlfriend visit Charlie and invite him to their wedding, and Charlie writes that it’s exciting to have things to look forward to. When his siblings visit him, they talk about Aunt Helen, and Charlie realizes there’s no point in blaming her for what she did to him because he would then have to blame the people who abused her, and so on. He writes that thinking that way “wasn’t going anywhere” and “wasn’t the point.”

In the hospital, Charlie decides that he isn’t the way he is because of what happened with Aunt Helen. He knows what happened is important, and he should remember it, but people are who they are for a lot of reasons, as his doctor tells him. Charlie says that he can choose where to go from there, to do things, and feel good about them. Thinking about the future, Charlie decides that if he has children, he’ll never tell them that someone has it worse because it doesn’t change the fact that the kids are upset.

When Charlie gets released from the hospital he goes to McDonald’s with his mom and they eat french fries together. Later, Sam and Patrick pick him up and drive Charlie through the tunnel. Patrick turns up the radio, and Charlie stands in the back of the truck with the wind in his face. He thinks about how he still loves his Aunt Helen for buying him to presents, and how much he wants the people around him to be happy. He starts crying because he’s aware that he’s “really there,” and that feeling is enough to make him feel “infinite.” Charlie writes that this will be his last letter because the new school year is starting, and he plans to be too busy with “participating” to write letters anymore. He ends by asking the reader to believe that things are good with him and promises to believe the same about the reader.