The Peanuts gang are all Patient in a 1950s insane asylum as perceived by Charlie Brown.
I'm almost ashamed about how much thought I put into this (almost) but once I started putting the pieces together I couldn't stop.
The Peanuts Gang are all patients in a 1950s insane asylum as perceived by Charlie Brown.
Charlie Brown is a Korean War vet who survived being a POW.
When he returned home to America he was suffering from an extreme case of shell shock (what we know today as post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD.)
Charlie Brown had reverted to the mental state of a young child as a way of blocking the horrors he experienced as a POW.
Because he perceives himself as a child he also does the same with his fellow patients who each suffer their own mental illnesses.
Charlie is afraid of the world and believes that everyone is out to get him which in turn causes him to suffer from clinical depression.
Lucy is a Sociopath who enjoys torturing her fellow patients for her own amusement, she has a particular interest in Charlie and considers him her special pet.
She enjoys manipulating him by pretending to be a sympathetic ear and then using what he tells her against him (i.e. pretending to be a psychiatrist), she steals his meds and enjoys playing keep away with them (the football represents his meds) and the fact that Lucy keeps stealing them from him is one of the reasons he can’t get better.
He is also too afraid to speak up because he fears retaliation.
Linus is schizophrenic.
He suffers from delusions, mostly of a religious nature.
Aside from a religious fanaticism he also believes in other delusions such as The Great Pumpkin and the Easter Bunny.
He carries around a blanket as a literal security blanket because he believes it protects him.
Despite his delusions he is kind hearted and caring which is why Charlie considers him Lucy’s opposite, the ying to her yang so to speak and therefore he perceives them as brother and sister.
Linus may also suffer from impotence and uses religion as a way to vent his sexual frustrations.
Sally is a sex addict who is obsessed with Linus.
She seeks out validation from men and is obsessive by nature so when a man scorns her advances she tries ever harder to seduce him.
She is also possessive to the point of attacking other women she sees as rivals for a man’s attention.
Though not physically attracted to Sally nor she to him, (perhaps he had been disfigured during the war and this is why he perceives himself as a bald, round headed kid)
Charlie sees Sally as a vulnerable young girl who is seeking the attention she never received from her father.
Because of this he places himself in the roll of big brother.
Sally is also functionally illiterate.
Peppermint Patty and Marcie are both lesbians who were forcefully institutionalized by their respective disapproving families in the hopes of curing them of their homosexuality.
Both are perfectly sane but because it was the 1950s homosexuality was still considered a mental illness and deviant behavior.
Peppermint Patty is a ‘butch’ lesbian who is defiant towards hospital staff which often leads to her being placed in solitary confinement (which Charlie perceives as Patty getting in trouble at school) while Marcie is of a meek and timid nature.
Patty is protective of Marcie and the two become lovers though Charlie sees them as just very close friends.
Charlie is attracted to Patty but transfers those feelings onto Patty causing him to believe she has a crush on him.
Pig-Pen is incapable of caring for himself and so has been declared an adult ward of the state since he has no family willing to care for him.
He is in denial and refuses to clean himself to the point that the staff would rather let him sit in his own filth than bother to constantly clean him by force.
Charlie is the only person who can stand to be around Pig-Pen for any length of time due to the fact that he had spent years in extremely unsanitary conditions during his time as a POW.
Schroeder is autistic, today he would be classified as having Asperger Syndrome.
He has no interest in physical or personal relationships and is extremely uncomfortable around people, something that Lucy loves to exploit by pretending to be infatuated with him.
She hovers around him constantly to antagonize him.
Schroeder is an idiot savant and gifted pianist with an obsession for Beethoven, having mastered all of his works by ear.
In order to placate him hospital staff had given him a toy piano which he plays constantly.
Charlie and Schroeder share a love of baseball, Schroeder being obsessed with STATS, players and other technical aspects of the game.
Charlie finds Schroeder’s piano playing comforting and often spends time listening to him play.
Due to Charlie’s timid nature Schroeder does not mind his company and appreciates having an audience.
Snoopy is a secondary personality of Charlie’s who is represented by his childhood dog.
Snoopy in turn is a multifaceted personality which is always changing and adding new personality traits.
His persona of a World War One flying ace is actually Charlie’s recollections of the Korean War stored within the Snoopy personality in order to protect Charlie from the horrible memories.
Snoopy is a much stronger willed personality and protects Charlie when situations become too unbearable such as when he is being tormented by Lucy.
Because Snoopy is a mute personality nobody even realizes there is a secondary personality at all.
Charlie will suddenly go silent and do something uncharacteristic such as grabbing Lucy and forcing a kiss on her.
This of course fuels her distain for Charlie causing her to continue abusing him.
Sometimes Charlie spontaneously breaks into dance which is how the Snoopy persona expresses glee and happiness, usually due to a pleasing delusion such as winning a victory over his nemeses the Red Barron (who represents the Koreans who shot down Charlie’s plane).
The Snoopy persona is also an avid writer, spending hours at a time hunched over a notebook.
Snoopy is the only one who understand what he writes however as what he writes is mainly gibberish and delusional nonsense.
Woodstock is a third, also mute personality that represents Charlie as he actually was as a child.
In reality Charlie was a small but plucky child.
He was athletic and brave for his size.
He was self-confident and intelligent, if not a bit quirky.
The medical staff are represented by the unseen ‘adults’.
Because they stand as the voice of rationality, undermining his delusions, he merely hears them as background mumbling, refusing to acknowledge what they are actually saying.
The fact that he is under medicated makes it all the harder to try and get through to him.
There is only one staff member that he truly acknowledges, a red headed nurse that he is infatuated with but refuses to speak to for fear of rejection.
By A Reddit User