Looking for Alaska by John Green

Looking for Alaska is a wonderfully beautiful tragedy. In it, we follow Miles “Pudge” Halter as he is sent away from his hometown in Florida to boarding school in Culver Creek, Alabama in a scenario that seems to parallel author John Green’s own schooling experience. While the first half of the book focuses on the typical coming-of-age themes that are common in most young adult books—wherein Pudge faces the trials of finding friends, falling in love and causing chaos for teachers and administrators— this falls apart in the second half of the book with the sudden and devastating death of Alaska Young, his close friend and the object of his affection.

The book itself is framed around the mystery behind the death of Alaska Young. Part one, labeled ‘before,’ is split into chapters counting down 136 days until Alaska’s fatal car accident, and part two, simply titled ‘after,’ documents the fallout that takes place among students in the remaining 136 days of the school year. This context is not dissimilar from how most people who have lost someone may suddenly view their own lives. In the wake of tragedy, everything revolves around the one instant in which everything has changed.

In fact, although the novel is written in the present tense, and even if you weren’t tipped off by the ‘tragedy’ mentioned in the book’s synopsis, all of the positive moments in the books are always heavily weighted by the numbers in the chapters that are counting down to when disaster finally strikes. For this reason, even as you are reading the beginning and watching events unfold, as a reader you are still tricked into thinking about the scenes playing out in the present tense as a happier time that will soon be lost.

In the wake of tragedy, everything revolves around the one instant in which everything has changed.

Credit: Wikipedia

Pudge comments on this nostalgia as he remarks, “Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia. (…) You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you’ll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present”(54). This is increasingly apparent in his own actions as he obsesses over discovering every detail about what happened on the night of Alaska’s death as a means for understanding why she is gone.

While Pudge is able to put together all of the puzzle pieces to figure out what really happened on the night of Alaska’s death, his grief is still there and the satisfaction is not what he expects. Pudge instead learns a new lesson of the immorality of being a teenager, “We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations…But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail”(220). But this thought can carry on to anyone whose death we have mourned. The end of life does not stop the mutation of how a human being is measured, but rather, it acts as a catalyst that gives mourners a chance to analyze their own memories of the person lost as a means of discovering who that person was to them.

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