Why Looking for Alaska is Such a Good Book

 

TW: mentions of suicide

    Looking for Alaska is a fantastic book by John Green. It uses many different unique story aspects to engage the reader and portray what is happening. To summarize, a high school student named Miles decides to leave his current school to attend a boarding school far from home. He meets his roommate, Chip and befriends him, quickly becoming comfortable with Chip’s whole friend group. He also meets Alaska, a girl he’s infatuated with despite the fact that she has a boyfriend. Halfway through the book, Alaska drives away from campus drunk in the middle of the night claiming to have forgotten something. She never returns. The rest of the book details Miles and Chip investigating her death and trying to figure out how and why it happened.

    I really love the use of major character death in this novel. I think it’s executed very well and it’s quite moving to see the feeling that Alaska’s friends go through after her death. The search for closure is an important aspect of the story that shows how the characters can react and grow as people. As a reader, the book leaves you feeling very empty when Alaska dies. She was arguably the main love interest of the story and she dies only shortly after she begins having a physical relationship with Miles. However, I think the author intentionally wants you to feel this emptiness and go through it with the characters, making the story all the more impactful.

    A connecting theme throughout the book is last words. Miles originally decides to attend the boarding school because of the poet François Rabelais’s famous last words about “seeking the great perhaps.” Miles related to this heavily as he felt stuck in his boring hometown with no friends, so he left to go somewhere completely new. He is also generally very enticed by last words, learning about them all the time and living his life on the wisdom of the almost-dead. Many other quotes like this are mentioned throughout the book, including “the labyrinth of suffering” which Simon Bolivar mentioned in his final moments. Alaska recognized this as an important analogy for life, and one of the main pieces of evidence that Miles and Chip find later is related to it. They found the words “straight and fast” written in her book, claiming that that was the way out of the labyrinth of suffering. This obviously leads Miles and Chip to suspect that Alaska commited suicide, turning over a whole new group of emotions for the both of them.

    The last element of the story I find very unique is that it doesn’t end all wrapped up nice with a bow. Miles and Chip still aren’t sure whether or not Alaska killed herself, and they never will be. They do figure out that the day she died was the anniversary of her mother’s death, so they realized that the thing she’d forgotten was the date. The whole death is still quite mysterious though, as, according to police officers, she didn’t swerve or hit the brakes at all when she slammed into their car. I think this aspect adds to the author’s intended discomfort. It’s not your basic plotline where all the characters survive and get a lovely happy ending; it’s messy. I think there’s beauty in that and it ties into real life a lot more than other books for that reason. We may not know why Alaska died, but that’s how life is sometimes.

    In conclusion, I think Looking for Alaska is a beautiful book that showcases relationships, grief, and coming-of-age in the lives of young people. It takes you through the emotions of the characters and allows you to understand as they mourn and grieve for their lost friend. It leaves many loose ends, but that’s just the nature of the great perhaps.