Inexperience is often treated as an obstacle to overcome. Judgment for immature behavior is followed by the snide encouragement to “grow up.” But once you age, there is no going back—except for cartoonist Charles M. Schulz and his childlike creativity in the legendary comic strip Peanuts.
Schulz sought to convey the complexities of childhood and human emotions through young and relatable characters. With the good-hearted but unlucky Charlie Brown, the timid and grounded Linus, and the zany and lovable Snoopy, Schulz examined faith, intolerance, and depression, all while keeping the Peanuts’ spirit light. The strip juxtaposed heavy-hearted nuance and slapstick comedy, a tension that created value for readers regardless of maturity, background, or intelligence.
In his 1963 essay, “On ‘Krazy Kat’ and ‘Peanuts,’” Italian critic Umberto Eco aptly described Peanuts as a “little human comedy for the innocent reader and for the sophisticated.” To Eco, the structured environment of Peanuts was a microcosm of the human condition—“neurotic protest [and] craving for attention,” for starters—but only if readers interpreted it in such a way. Reading one panel in passing gives the impression that all is well. A deeper and continuous examination of the literature, however, reveals that the main characters are worn down by routine and condemned to sacrifice their bliss.
Eco provides some examples of sustained suffering. Charlie Brown, seeking “tenderness and fulfillment on every side . . . [is] repaid by the matriarchal, know-it-all girls of his group with scorn, references to his round head, accusations of stupidity, all the little digs that strike home.” While the most practical of the bunch, Linus’ “emotional instability would be his perpetual condition if the society in which he lives had not already offered him the remed[y]” of his actual safety blanket.
The Peanuts cast receives the sentimental and tangible consequences of defeat, which would damage and cultivate the mind of any real-world child. But these icons trudge on, largely refusing to change their approach through the comic’s run to conquer the odds or leverage a situation. Schulz’s doodles don’t adapt to setbacks, and Eco contends it’s an intentional decision to keep the conditions necessary for tragedy and humor.
Thus, the question: If repetition is inevitable, shouldn’t it be conducive to human flourishing?
Schulz’s brilliance lies with the audience in determining if simplicity is a false hope. In the static setting of Peanuts, childhood is not a golden, carefree time. The characters’ pursuit of happiness, acceptance, and the possibility of success in their endeavors is often met with disappointment or frustration. Peanuts emphasizes that children’s pain and anguish are more intensely felt and remembered than those of adults—and it perverts Schulz’s creations to become, as Eco describes, “monstrous infantile reductions of all the neuroses of a modern citizen of industrial civilization.”
Take one of the most famous recurring gags in the cartoon—Charlie Brown attempting to punt the football from Lucy—as an example. He treats others and the world around him kindly because he believes in the strength of his friends, yet Lucy continuously sabotages him by yanking away the football every time he gets close enough to hit it, prompting him to fall flat on his back, dazed and confused. Over the years, Chuck sets himself up to kick the football from Lucy with the same factors, holding onto a sense of hope and trust that never materializes. Lucy seconds this observation in one 1965 strip: “I admire you, Charlie Brown . . . you have such faith in human nature. . .”
Repeated failures suggest clarity—whether emotional lucidity or as a rational understanding of life—is elusive and perhaps unattainable. Reciprocity doesn’t exist when faith is misplaced. Eco notes that, in today’s age of uncertainty, we root for Charlie Brown and the most straightforward outcome. Life, for better or worse, is inherently messy, and justice isn’t a given but often foreign to our projects. If we aren’t aware of this or don’t calibrate our approach differently, we are doomed to blindly trust someone or something that was never a saving grace. That is the true crisis woven into the fabric of Peanuts.
Peanuts’s narrative is ultimately a story of hopeless grown-ups masquerading as kids. They work through daily struggles like love, identity, and confidence without actually solving them. The deliberate lack of closure both mirrors the emptiness that real life sometimes brings and confronts older storytelling techniques defined by resolution.
If any whimsy exists within the Peanuts universe, strictly adhering to convention will not grant it. Monotony is the happiness killer. It pervades past the fictional realm of Schulz’s scribbles and extends into Schulz’s inner philosophies and personal experiences.
According to writer David Michaelis, Schulz constructed a legend of himself as “dumb, dull, [and] meek.” His earliest rejections to gain recognition in school later became the basis for Charlie Brown’s personality. Even Schulz once remarked that he was “the worst kind of egotist, the kind that pretends to be humble,” and considered each strip he made to be a “fight” to win readers’ attention. Whereas characters like Lucy van Pelt reflect such feelings with her competitiveness, Linus has a self-reflective approach to ego that is channeled with “developing character,” and Snoopy embraces bombastic personas as Joe Cool and other aliases.
The Golden Years of Peanuts were not entirely pessimistic, but injected with religion. [Identifying] (https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2016/04/the-spirituality-of-snoopy/479664/) with Christianity, as a Sunday School teacher who also led Bible studies, Schulz designed his creations to maintain faith in something greater than themselves, with theological undertones seen in 560 of his strips. Whether it be Lucy booming “amen” after a school pledge, expositing on Isaiah, or Snoopy finding solace in Jesus’s words from John’s Gospel while stuck in a blizzard, Schulz saw religion as a way to cope with the world’s unpredictability. Peanuts was not dogmatic or overt with its preachings, but framed “The Gospel According to Peanuts” naturally within its setting.
During the 20th century, it was taboo for illustrators to invoke religion, and the industry warned against it. Famously, network executives were against the last-minute inclusion of Linus reading from Luke 2 in A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) As a self-described “minister in the pulpit,” Schulz weaved Christianity to make his art philosophically valuable—even borrowing from sources like Dostoyevsky’s Father Zosima—and challenge the increasingly secular mores of the real world. It was an exercise of creative control and autonomy, with Schulz’s panels becoming a place where readers could be part of an active conversation instead of merely spectating.
Like the tiny tree that Charlie Brown picks for the school Christmas pageant—which acts as a metaphor for the Incarnation and the kids at long last decorate—Schulz was explicit but went for understatement, enticing the readers to adorn his art with their own imaginations. If Peanuts was Schulz’s template for contemplating real and abstract matters, Charlie Brown and the Peanuts cast dove headfirst into adulthood. When Schulz glazed over the innocence and jovial nature of youth, it was an artistic decision to propel Peanuts into the limelight. The gambit, as history shows, succeeded big time.
Schulz used this formula from 1950 until 1997, when he took a five-week production break, opting to feature reruns of the strip in the meantime. As fate would have it, Schulz would soon discover that a “rerun” isn’t just a placeholder but an instrument that could breathe new life into an existing project.
Initially mentioned in 1972 and debuted in 1973, Rerun van Pelt was Linus and Lucy’s overlooked baby brother. He was like any typical toddler: learning new things, moving around a lot, and saying whatever came to mind. Aside from one notable plotline with Snoopy rigging a baseball game early on, Schulz sidelined Rerun, giving him infrequent cameos for decades because his childlike tendencies didn’t fit Peanuts’s existential narrative. Schulz would later go on to call Rerun “a mistake.”
In the early 1990s, Rerun was brought back to explore the grandparent-grandchild relationship, where Schulz found a purpose for the character and recognized that youth is an asset to his world-building. Christopher Caldwell noted that Rerun’s return paralleled a shift in Schulz’s life, who “learned what to do with him by watching his own grandchildren.” Children captivate the hearts and minds of their elders through their play. For Schulz, that play became impressionable and relatable, causing him to reflect on overlooked elements missing from the strip. As a gateway to introducing the emotional insight needed to build authentic and deep bonds, Rerun bridged innocence with experience as younger and older generations vitally learn from their different stages of life.
In 1996, Schulz aged Rerun up to kindergarten—still younger than the leading ensemble—to bring direct and unfiltered curiosity to the forefront, like asking surprising questions and scribbling weird drawings. He hid under his bed to avoid going to school, fumbled with watercolors, and eventually was expelled for being outspoken. Rerun had traits expected of a kid, and this awe subverted Schulz and readers alike, making him an attractive black sheep of the franchise in its final years. Rerun modeled what Kindergarten’s founder, Frederick Fröbel, said: “The play of children is not recreation; it means earnest work.”
What made Rerun’s childish sense of wonder so intriguing in the Peanuts world was his inherent libertarianism. Almost every character in Peanuts is encumbered by some grander desire, whether it be public validation for Charlie, control for Lucy, or talent mastery for Schroder. However, Rerun isn’t preoccupied with seeking external support; he believes in figuring life out for himself. For instance, when Rerun wants to learn how to ride a bike, he doesn’t let his parents or siblings help. This is the child mentality of doing over thinking—not to mention Charlie Brown’s overthinking—as a display of self-reliance with which most young adults, like the Peanuts crew, struggle. In turn, his scrappy self-starter mindset starkly contrasted with the other characters’ more reliant attitudes.
Rerun deeply appreciates being in the moment, seeing that every novel experience is another route for playful exploration. He innocently toys with conventions in his later appearances, going as far as manipulating Peanuts’ last football gag without audiences ever knowing if Charlie Brown finally kicked the ball. What was once a predictable joke was sent off with an incredible sense of mystique, wholesomely playing with readers’ heartstrings.
From an adult standpoint—alongside Lucy’s reaction to this event—we could consider Rerun disrupting the status quo. From Rerun’s perspective, he sees this well-worn routine as open to possibility. Where adults tend to see repetition as an inevitability or a consequence of tradition, children, like Rerun, see it as a game: something to be molded or even disregarded when the rules don’t serve any greater purpose. In this sense, Rerun is a co-creator, not merely a player, in determining life’s outcomes.
While Charlie Brown and his friends often spoke and acted beyond their years, Rerun had a grounded imagination that governed his actions. It’s why Rerun developed a close affinity for Snoopy in the strip’s final years—he’s the only other character whose embrace of the experimental and avant-garde was central to their identity. As much as Rerun wanted a dog, he saw companionship and potential in Snoopy, joining him in stomping in jigsaw puzzle pieces to “complete” the scene and outmaneuvering Rerun’s ban from the local baseball league. These creative endeavors based on friendship demonstrate that childlike wonder can extract value every day in unappreciated moments.
It’s important to recognize that Snoopy’s fantastical elements were a precursor to Rerun. Still, some cultural critics argue that Snoopy’s interactions with his surroundings and excessive focus almost sunk the strip in the 1970s and onwards.
In The New York Press, Christopher Caldwell scathed Snoopy as never being “a full participant in the tangible relationships that drove Peanuts in its golden age.” Snoopy’s inability to talk isolated him from the rest of the cast and forced his appearances to engage in plots detached from reality.
While Snoopy’s World War I Flying Ace sequences sought to increase entertainment value by rivaling The Red Baron, Caldwell saw this coping philosophy as antisocial, making Snoopy shallow to analyze. For Caldwell, this emphasis disrespected the Peanuts’ ode to maturity and wisdom through consequence. While Snoopy takes readers on a thrill ride with perceived high-stakes dogfights, it doesn’t impact any significant dynamics or relationships because it’s all in his head. Thus, it’s difficult to discern how Snoopy’s imagination gears him to tackle actual problems if he always avoids them.
Meanwhile, Sarah Boxer in The Atlantic touted Snoopy’s land of make-believe as an asset, calling it a “rich inner life, a place that no human ever got to see.” Boxer lauded Snoopy as a brief reprieve from life’s dull moments, letting escapism artificially create the character Snoopy wanted to be. But, as Boxer admits, “Snoopy’s soul is all about self-invention—which can be seen as delusional self-love. This new Snoopy, his detractors [like Caldwell] felt, had no room for empathy.”
Creative power is always meaningful, but it need not be so self-absorbing. Snoopy’s solitude becomes an abyss, wrongly encouraging us to look solely inward for satisfaction. Instead of using imagination to at least partly fuel individual progress or genuine social change, Snoopy’s quests are distracting, becoming too sappy and sanitized to continue Peanuts’ original mission effectively. Boxer may adore Snoopy’s presence, but “the head in the clouds” culture he breeds can’t adequately build a more thoughtful, responsible, and wondrous society.
Unlike Snoopy, Rerun accepts life’s limitations rather than concocting a utopia where those restraints don’t exist. He can’t decide his age and the oversight associated with it, yet his responses to non-ideal situations seek to maximize his circumstances. When Rerun is stuck in the back of his mother’s bicycle seat, he slyly narrates those rides as nature documentaries. When Charlie Brown chides Rerun as a “left fielder who’s still on the bottle,” Rerun has a great at-bat, uses his bottle to catch four balls, and wins Chuck’s team their first game.
Rerun uses idealism to defy expectations, which his peers can practically observe and feel. He confronts challenges head-on with a smile and refuses to endure the gauntlet of mediocrity. By charging forward and exposing himself to life’s offerings, Rerun counters the culture of entitlement and irresponsibility that Caldwell finds in Peanuts. Moreover, Rerun excels within any given setting because he realizes that wonder, properly used, is a tool for flourishing.
Schulz’s version of wonder doesn’t and can’t arise from mundane repetition or a complete disconnect from reality. For him, wonder lies within the silver lining to struggle, discovery in the ordinary, appreciation of the present moment, and emotional depth of trial and error. Schulzian wonder restores lost creativity to adults and endows children with a newfound sense of realism. Both sentiments can exist and thrive in tandem, and Rerun Van Pelt shows readers why this is a feeling worth chasing.
Rerun’s marvel was such a dominant force that other characters responded to him by revising their defining qualities. Lucy isn’t a staunch opinionist around Rerun; instead, she’s a pseudo-mother figure who listens to his accounts of his days at school and watches over him. Unlike everyone else, Rerun sees Charlie Brown as a role model with great knowledge and capability. Thus, his attitude shifts from terrified to motivational when teaching Rerun how to feed a dog, deliver newspapers, and play marbles—Charlie even gains the courage to stand up to a bully because of Rerun.
Rerun’s new storytelling possibilities and corresponding popularity led to his continued presence in Peanuts, becoming the focal point for many new plots. Surprisingly, Rerun outlasted Lucy and Linus, whose last appearances were in December 1999 and January 2000, respectively. The tone shifted from pragmatism to wacky, as serious subjects became secondary concerns—the strip’s visual style also evolved, becoming more minimalist with time.
Once a reject, Rerun challenged the Peanuts zeitgeist with his easygoing and cheerful representation of childhood. He ultimately converted the characters around him and the comic itself to his brilliance—he even persuaded critics like Caldwell, defied Eco, and kept in line with Boxer’s praises of Snoopy. In Schulz’s words: “lately, Rerun has almost taken over the strip.”
When Schulz tragically died in February 2000, Peanuts’s final state differed vastly from where it began. With Rerun’s re-emergence in the last years of Peanuts, he was a kind reminder that life, despite its struggles, can still be viewed through the eyes of a child, untainted by the disillusion and worries of adulthood. There is an emotional freshness with being young, and its upsides should be admired and savored, not ignored. If adulthood got the series its original stardom, childlike wonder built upon its legacy and kept the strip alive until its end.
When Schulz got tired of being an adult, he very much wanted to be young again. Rerun allowed Schulz to unleash his inner child—and maybe the kid he never got to be—through this new pleasure, leaving readers with poignant moments rooted in basic joys.
Childlike wonder isn’t bracketed by age; it’s a state of being, and Schulz, Rerun, and Peanuts display its timeless quality. Take time to enjoy the little things because, regarding wonder, there is no rush to “grow up.”
Alex Rosado works on professional and academic program in Washington, DC. He invites you to follow him on Twitter.