Good Grief...
Charlie Brown ... Christian or existentialist? Child of God or abandoned by the universe? Nathan Radke examines the existential Charlie Brown in Philosophy Today. After reading the essay, I'm not convinced that this was what Schultz was going for ... then again, when Radke quotes Sartre on how comforting it would be not to be an existentialist, it makes me wonder if Sartre got what Sartre was going for ...

"If you are born cowards, you can be quite content, you can do nothing about it and you will be cowards all your life whatever you do; and if you are born heroes you can again be quite content; you will be heroes all your life, eating and drinking heroically. Whereas the existentialist says that the coward makes himself cowardly, the hero makes himself heroic; and that there is always the possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero."

Good grief. Only a simplistic sense of determinism could bear the first premise. Because the most common of human instincts seems to me to be: "I was not born for this, I was born for something more... why am I not what I was made to be?" So the coward will always wonder if he's not actually a bungled hero and the hero will always wonder if his cowardice is about to be found out.