Charlie Brown has to be the one who suffers... -Schulz

Failed baseball team manager, kiting enthusiast, “inveterate worrier,” blockhead, and hopeless romantic, Charlie Brown is Schulz’s everyman, a break from the hard-edged kids of Little Rascals fame and “anticipating the ‘sensitive male’” of the sixties. He possesses a comic and tragic mix of hope, self-reflection, self-doubt, and loyalty. Charlie Brown is a symbol of “mid-century America’s…need to communicate” and “new awareness of feelings.”

He also reflects his author’s own struggles with inferiority and rejection: Schulz was a “non-entity” as a child, “failing at everything.” He “never [forgot] a slight,” and his frustrations found their way into his work: Charlie Brown’s “little Red-head girl” was a young lady who turned down Schulz’s marriage proposal.

But like Schulz who went to work every day for fifty-years, hand writing and drawing every Peanuts strip, Charlie Brown is a flagship for determination…but also “the personification of gullibility.” Charlie Brown will always get his kite stuck in the tree, and it will always depress him, but he will never stop flying. A frequent visitor to Lucy’s psychiatry booth (who’s to say how many nickels she’s collected from him) he struggles with the meaning of life and his place in it. Every Fall he lets Lucy hold the football for him and every Fall she pulls it away, sending him flying. But for fifty years he never gave up hope.