This was my favorite story that we had to read throughout the class, stories that use the template of the narrator writing letters to ambiguous “friends” as a way to speak directly to the reader are always really personal, and it reminds me of “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” in a lot of senses. There’s Werther’s struggle with mental illness, the love triangle, the vivid imagery, internal monologue, sensitive nature, and even the ending is vaguely similar. The main difference is that we know that Werther doesn’t survive in the epilogue, or rather Editor’s Note, and it isn’t written from his perspective to the reader.
Werther, like I mentioned before, is an extraordinarily sensitive person. After dancing with and falling for Lottie he said, “since that time sun, moon, and stars can calmly go about their business, I know neither day nor night, and the whole world fades away around me.” (pp. 30-31) I love how gentle Werther really is throughout the whole novel, he understood how deeply infatuated and in love he is with Lottie, but he also has a constant internal battle about how selfish he is because he is genuinely friends with and cares for her fiancé. He feels like a character who really could be a real person with how deeply complex and sympathetically he feels; yes, he can be a little dramatic, but I also think that partially comes with the territory of being a deeply emotional artist. To many people, it may seem ridiculous that he’s so hung up on her after having only one dance, but it was more than that. It was a genuine connection as he and the woman he fell for stared out at an oncoming storm; a storm both literal and figurative.
I like how you pointed out that Werther is an artist and that a lot of artists tend to be very emotional. For someone like Werther, unrequited love is one of the most painful feelings he has ever experienced. This feeling entirely consumes him, unfortunately, and he has to face the fact that Charlotte will never be his, no matter how much he wishes for it. Being in love with someone but them not loving you back, in the same way, is, in my opinion, one of the most painful emotions to feel.