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Looking for Alaska: Character Analysis and the Labyrinth Part 3

December 10, 2009 in Book Analysis, Young Adult Fiction with 31 Comments

I finished the previous post in the series by answering how Alaska escaped the labyrinth of suffering. In this post I will explore how Miles chooses a better way out of the Labyrinth.

Miles: How He Experiences and Escapes the Labyrinth of Suffering:

At some point in life “Everyone…gets dragged out to sea by the undertow…we are all going.” In other words, at some point in time we know we are going to die/suffer or someone we love and care for is going to die, how do we deal with this knowledge? Right now Miles’ answer is to believe in an afterlife, however Miles becomes enlightened and he changes his outlook on surviving the Labyrinth.

Something similar to a parable/riddle is then introduced in the novel after Miles makes his inital decision about surviving the Labyrinth. The parable is:

Banzan “Was walking through the market one day when he overheard someone ask a butcher for his best piece of meat. The butcher answered, “Everything in my shop is the best. You cannot find a piece of meat that is not the best.” Upon hearing this, Banzan realized that there is no best and no worst, that those judgments have no real meaning because there is only what is, and poof he reached enlightenment.” How does this relate to the central question of surviving the labyrinth of suffering?

Looking for Alaska: Character Analysis and the Labyrinth Part 2

December 3, 2009 in Book Analysis, Young Adult Fiction with 13 Comments

I finished my previous post with the questions: How do Miles and Alaska escape the labyrinth of suffering? According to them what is the best way to go about being a person? What rules do they abide by and how do they best play the game of life? Let’s explore these questions by first looking at Alaska Young.

Alaska: How She Experiences and Escapes the Labyrinth of Suffering:

Alaska watches her mother die and is frozen into paralysis from calling 911 to save her. Alaska blames herself (as does her father) for her mother’s death. This is the main incident that causes Alaska’s subsequent suffering and pain. Her pain further snowballs when she forgets the anniversary of her mother’s death and she feels she has failed her mother yet another time. You can feel the pain Alaska experiences when she says:

Looking for Alaska: Character Analysis and the Labyrinth

November 26, 2009 in Book Analysis, Young Adult Fiction with 3 Comments

Looking for Alaska Character Analysis 1

“What is the best way to go about being a person?…What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it?”

This is the central question that Alaska Young and Miles Halter struggle with throughout the novel Looking for Alaska. What is the answer to this question? What do Alaska and Miles conclude? To answer these questions let’s first explore the meaning of the Labyrinth in Looking for Alaska.

Book Review: Looking For Alaska by John Green

January 2, 2009 in Book Reviews, Featured, Young Adult Fiction with 3 Comments

THE BEFORE AND THEN the after. Two distinct realities experienced by Miles Halter (nicknamed “Pudge”), the protagonist, in Looking for Alaska. It is also the way that John Green has broken up the novel, starting off with Before and midway through the novel continuing with After. This can’t be explained further without spoiling the story.

Miles Halter is a loner and lives a pretty mundane and uneventful life in Florida with his parents and has an obsession with the last words of famous people. In fact, It is the last words of a poet Francois Rabelais “I go to seek a Great Perhaps” that propels Miles’ desire to experience something new that is not as predictable and mundane as his current life.

In pursuit of The Great Perhaps, Miles attends a boarding school away from home in Alabama and he meets his roommate “The Colonel” (Chip Martin) who is a short, fearless, math genius who