Looking For Alaska

Looking for Alaska is John Green’s debut novel which was received very well worldwide but with a bit of controversy for its certain explicit contents. It has been nominated for and won many awards and accolades.

Tired and bored of his hitherto uneventful life, Miles “Pudge” Halter who is obsessed with memorizing last words of famous dead people, heads off to Culver Creek Boarding School in Albama with the sole purpose of searching his “Great Perhaps” (Inspired by a poet named Rabelais’s last words,  “I go to seek a Great Perhaps”).

At the school, Miles makes great friends with his roommate, Chip Martin aka “The Colonel”, classmates, Takumi Hikohito, and Alaska Young. Alaska is a young, beautiful yet wild and reckless young girl whom Miles falls in love with.

“So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.”

Looking for Alaska is divided into two halves titled simply as “Before” and “After” with reference to a tragic event that forms a substantial part of the novel. The first half consists of a nice, easy-going storyline of teen students attending their classes, preparing for their exams, gang rivalry, indulging into pranks and adventures, and the inevitable falling in love and talking to each other asking questions such as Simon Bolivar’s last words:

“How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!”

So what’s the labyrinth?’ I asked her…

That’s the mystery, isn’t it? Is the labyrinth living or dying? Which is he trying to escape- the world or the end of it?”

This “labyrinth” becomes a central discussion encompassing all characters at one point when the After comes. That’s when the book loses the mundane and reaches the momentous. And it is a grave, serious, painful and genuine journey until we are able to close the book.

This debut novel of John Green is not one of those routine love stories involving a boy and a girl who happen to fall in love, face certain hurdles but ultimately reach their happily ever after. It is much more than a story of Alaska Young as the title may suggest. Looking for Alaska touches the vulnerable and much less talked about aspects of life. The entire novel felt to me like an attempt to find out the answer to Bolivar’s question of how to get out of the labyrinth that everyone encounters during their lifetime and maybe in their afterlife as well.

The novel showcases its characters identifying and trying to find a way out of their respective labyrinths. For Miles, it was a labyrinth of suffering. And he acknowledges that despite his sufferings he continues to have faith in his “Great Perhaps” implying that for him this Great Perhaps is finding a meaning to his life through the inevitable grief and sufferings. The novel deals with the aftermath of a death, the process of its acceptance, grieving, and learning to live with it, healing one day at a time.

The major themes of the novel are death, sufferings, loss, and grief. But as the novel reaches its conclusion, Green has beautifully woven them all together with a radiant and strong thread of hope. Hope in the form of forgiveness and acceptance.

“So I know she forgives me, just as I forgive her.”

“Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slow, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone.”

Looking for Alaska is a journey of self-discovering, of identifying ones Great Perhaps and labyrinths. It explore the true understanding of how forgiveness buds from within and eventually, how the resultant love blooms. If one loves another, if one feels strongly enough, can the aggregate of those emotions become a sum greater than the original? Can loving someone satisfy even without ever truly knowing them? Those are the answers you might find somewhere in the pages of this book.  For me, Looking for Alaska is a sad, funny, inspiring and compelling tale of love and life.