Chuck Klosterman

can’t write objectively about Charlie Brown. Any detachment I express is an illusion, or maybe a straightforward lie. My alleged critical distance microscopes to zero. It always feels like I’m pretending to write about a two-dimensional character when I’m really just writing about myself.

This, I realize, is no accident.

I know that Charlie Brown is a literary invention consciously designed to make people feel like they’re looking at an image of themselves. If you can’t empathize with Charlie Brown, you likely lack an ability to empathize with any fictional character. Here is a child continually humiliated for desiring nothing more than normalcy—the opportunity to kick a football, the aptitude to fly a kite, the freedom to walk down the sidewalk without having a random acquaintance compare his skull to a block of lumber. He wants glory, but not an excessive amount (one baseball victory would be more than enough). He has the coolest dog in town, but that plays to his disadvantage. He’s an eight-year-old who needs a psychiatrist, and he has to pay the bill himself (only five cents, but still). Charlie Brown knows his life is a contradictory struggle, and sometimes his only option is to lie in a dark room, alone with his thoughts. He will never win. He will never win. Yet Charlie Brown is still happy. He still has friends. He still gets excited about all his little projects that are all destined to fail. Very often, young Americans are simultaneously pessimistic about the world and optimistic about themselves—they assume everyone’s future is bleak, except for their own. Charlie Brown is the opposite. He knows he’s doomed, but that doesn’t stop him from trying anything and everything. He believes existence is amazing, despite his own personal experience. It’s the quality that makes him so likeable: he does not see the cruel world as cruel. He believes the world is good, even if everything that’s ever happened to him suggests otherwise. All he wants are the things everyone else seems to get without trying. He aspires to be average, which—for him—is an impossible dream.

I suppose nobody feels this way all the time. But everybody feels this way occasionally.

Charles M. Schulz died on February 12, 2000. The final Peanuts strip ran the very next day, a coincidence noted by virtually everyone who cared about the man and his work. In the years since his passing, I’ve noticed a curious trend: for whatever reason, it’s become popular to assert that the spiritual center of the Peanuts universe is not Charlie Brown. The postmodern answer to that puzzle is Snoopy—dynamic, indefatigable, and hyperimaginative. Perception has drifted toward the qualities that the public prefers to celebrate. It’s a little like what happened on the TV show Happy Days: by its third season, a sitcom originally focused on milquetoast Richie Cunningham had evolved into a vehicle for the supercoolness of Fonzie. Obviously, this type of paradigm shift is no crime against humanity, and I love Snoopy almost as much as his owner (he’s a wonderful dancer and my all-time favorite novelist). But Snoopy is not the emotional vortex of Peanuts. That’s simply wrong. The linchpin to Peanuts will always be Charlie Brown. It can be no one else. And this is because Charlie Brown effortlessly embodies what Peanuts truly is: an introduction to adult problems, explained by children.

THE INEVITABLE DEATH of daily newspapers will have a lot of collateral damage, some of which will matter more than others. I don’t know where the gradual disappearance of the Sunday comics falls within this continuum, or even if it belongs at all. I assume something else will come to occupy its role in the culture, and the notion of bemoaning such a loss will be categorized as nostalgia for an era when the media was controlled by dinosaurs who refused to accept that the purpose of every news story was to provide random people the opportunity to publicly comment on how they felt about it. But I will miss the Sunday comics. I miss them already. As a kid, I loved the idea that there was at least one section of the newspaper directly targeted at my brain; as an adult, it was reassuring to see something that was still the exact same product I remembered from the past. It was static in the best way possible. Like most people, I moved through incremental adolescent phases when different strips temporarily became my obsession: Garfield in fifth grade, Shoe in seventh grade, The Far Side throughout high school, Calvin and Hobbes as a college boozehound. But I always considered Peanuts the most “important” comic strip, and the one that all other strips were measured against. The fact that Peanuts was the first strip on the very top of the Sunday comics’ front page verified this subjective belief—if comics were rock bands, it seemed obvious that Peanuts was the Beatles.

In 2014, I was asked to write the foreword to a collection of Peanuts strips published by Fantagraphics Books (and the essay you’re reading now is, essentially, the essay that became that foreword). The strips in this particular collection stretched from 1956 to 1960. It was a transitional period for Peanuts—the characters no longer had the generic, unsophisticated appearance of the early Li’l Folks epoch, but their fantasies and dialogue rarely skewed as surreal as they would throughout the mid-sixties and beyond. Snoopy “talks,” but not in the way we’re accustomed (his concerns are more traditionally doglike). His jowls and his gut look a tad thin. Linus van Pelt—still noticeably younger than all the other kids in ’57—eventually became interchangeable with his slightly older peers (Schulz was enamored with Linus during this five-year stretch and placed him at the center of the majority of the offerings, most notably a three-week serial where the boy worries about performing at the Christmas program). Around 1959, readers were introduced to Sally Brown for the first time (still an infant). But the most critical evolution involved the persona of Charlie Brown himself. It is during this five-year stretch that he became “the Charlie Browniest.” Throughout the mid-­sixties, Charlie Brown was still a remarkably confident dude. On the anthology’s second page, we see a boy who believes his snow fort is an architectural masterwork; eighteen pages later, Charlie Brown violently punishes the kite he cannot fly. He’s not arrogant, but he is self-assured. He even has moments as a smart aleck. Yet by the inception of the sixties, all that confidence is dead. From 1960 onward, Charlie Brown is the person we all recognize from all those thirty-minute television specials: the unironic loser with a limitless heart, habitually hammered for caring too much.

“Nobody likes me,” Charlie Brown says as he stares into space. “All it would take to make me happy is have someone say he likes me.” When Lucy overhears this lament, she’s immediately incredulous. “Do you mean to tell me that someone has it within his or her power to make you happy merely by doing such a simple thing?” Charlie Brown assures her that—yes—this simple act is all it would take. In fact, it wouldn’t even matter if the sentiment wasn’t true. He just wants to know how it feels to be liked. But even this is still too much to ask for.

“I can’t do it,” Lucy replies. And then she walks away. And this, it seems, is the totality of the joke.

One of the common assumptions about Peanuts is that Charlie Brown and Charles M. Schulz were the same person, and that we are able to perceive the personality of Schulz by studying the personality of Brown. Certain similarities are undeniable (both of their fathers were barbers, both were obsessed with red-haired girls they never really knew, etc.). But I don’t think this connection is fully accurate. The reflection is not as clear-cut as it seems. I believe the primordial Li’l Folks version of Charlie Brown—the slightly more assertive kid from the 1940s—was Schulz crafting a fictional version of his literal childhood. Early Charlie Brown was, at least in theory, who Schulz once was. It was an attempt at veiled autobiography. But the later model of Charlie Brown we recognize and love so much more—the model reinvented at the end of the 1950s—was Schulz crafting a version of how he felt, both in his memory and in the present tense. It was the construct of an adult, suffering through problems only an adult can conceive and recognize. It was also a depiction of how he wanted to feel: Schulz the man was rumored to be a maniacal grudge holder, unwilling to forget any slight or embarrassment ever leveled against him. His creative boyhood doppelganger is the opposite. Charlie Brown could always wipe the slate clean. And that makes an overpowering difference, both for the character and for everyone else.

“IT’S DEPRESSING TO realize that you’re so insignificant you haven’t got a chance ever to become president,” Charlie Brown tells Lucy on a June Sunday in 1957. “It wouldn’t be so bad if I thought I had some chance.” Like so much of the classic Peanuts banter, he makes these remarks apropos of nothing—it’s just something he’s suddenly worried about, for no clear reason. Lucy, of course, obliterates Charlie Brown for voicing this trepidation, mocking him with a tsunami of faint praise, almost as if he had somehow claimed he was destined for political greatness. Is her response amusing? I suppose it’s a little amusing. But it’s mostly dark and entirely true. At the age of eight, Charlie Brown is considering a reality that most people don’t confront until much later: a realization that the future is limited. It’s not that he desperately wants to become Dwight Eisenhower—it’s the simple recognition that this couldn’t happen even if he did. He’s confronting the central myth of childhood, which is that anyone can be anything. Charlie Brown represents the downside of adult consciousness. What does Lucy represent? Lucy represents the world itself. Lucy responds the way society always responds to any sudden insight of existential despair: how did you not know this already, Blockhead?

It doesn’t matter how many times this sort of thing has happened before. It will never stop happening. Like I said—Charlie Brown knows he’s doomed. He absolutely knows it. But a little part of his mind always suggests, “Maybe not this time, though.” That glimmer of hope is his Achilles’ heel. It’s also the attribute that makes him so imminently relatable. The joke is not that Charlie Brown is hopeless. The joke is that Charlie Brown knows he’s hopeless, but he doesn’t trust the infallibility of his own insecurity. If he’s always wrong about everything, perhaps he’s wrong about this, too. When Charlie Brown mentions the impossibility of his own presidential fantasy, there’s a vague sense that he wants Lucy to tell him he’s mistaken. And at first (of course), Lucy does exactly that. She says “maybe.” And then (of course) she does what she always does. She reminds Charlie Brown that he is Charlie Brown. Which is how I suspect Charles M. Schulz felt about himself, up until the very end: “No matter what I do or what I try, I’m always going to be myself.” There’s a pragmatism to Schulz’s philosophy that’s so deep it would likely disturb modern readers, particularly those raised to believe that unmitigated agency over one’s personal experience is a human right. My favorite example comes from 1973. Charlie Brown and Linus are walking through a downpour. In the cartoon’s second panel, Charlie Brown stoically quotes from the book of Matthew: “The rain falls on the just and the unjust.” They trudge through panel three, wordlessly considering the meaning of this passage. And then at the conclusion, Linus remarks, “That’s a good system!” This exchange has unconsciously become the center of my entire belief system. It is totally, irrefutably true. But who still thinks this way? As far as I can tell, almost no one.

In the Fantagraphics anthology that included my foreword, there were four strips where Charlie Brown attempted to kick a football. Unless you’re a yet-to-be-conceived archaeologist reading this book one thousand years in the future, the outcome of these attempts will not surprise you. Two of these strips (released roughly a year apart) are so similar they almost suggest a lack of imagination. In one, Charlie Brown expresses his conviction that people have the ability to change and deserve the opportunity to do so (and then he breaks his back). In the other, Lucy compliments Charlie Brown’s faith in human nature (moments after his back has been broken). This is the reassuring, quasi-eternal, death-and-taxes aspect to Peanuts: the children don’t grow up and the conflicts don’t change. The pigskin’s omnipresent unkickability is the Sisyphean symbol for the whole of Charlie Brown’s life and the principal metaphor behind why he matters so much to so many people. It is the apex of his failures. But failing is not what makes Charlie Brown my fictional friend and personal protagonist. It’s his reasoning for placing himself in a position where failure is inevitable: “I must be out of my mind,” he says to himself. “But I can’t resist kicking footballs.”

He can’t resist kicking footballs.

Even though he never, ever does. He still can’t resist.

Resistance is futile.