Looking for Alaska is a wonderful book by John Green. In this book, the characters are in a prestigious boarding school. The main characters are Miles “Pudge” Halter, Chip “The Colonel” Martin, Takumi Hikohito, Alaska Young, and Lara Buterskaya. The book is about these teenagers trying to understand life. The main character, Miles, tries to find out who he is and tries to experience new things in his life. When Alaska goes missing, he begins to try to understand what happened to her and misses her. When she goes missing, he thinks back to the fond memories that he has of her.
The story is told in a brilliant way. It manages to pull the reader along to whatever is going on in the story. John Green does a good job at making ever character very relatable in some way, he wants to constantly make us emotionally invested with every character in the story. Even though the story is about the protagonist trying to get over his feelings for Alaska and us experiencing his incredible bond with her, it’s also a wonderful story about people learning new things constantly in their teenage years. Miles is an inexperienced nerdy kind of guy, and he is introduced to Chip who is a really cool person, almost the exactly the opposite of Miles. Miles goes through a journey of exploration of smoking, drinking, and other things with Chip who is also, in a way, trying to find out who he really is as well.
I believe that this book is very symbolic. Cigarettes are used as a symbol in this story. It is used as a sign of rebellion, but also it symbolizes time running out. One very popular quote from Alaska is, “Y’all smoke to enjoy it, I smoke to die.” I believe that cigarettes are used as a way to symbolize death and time running out. Alaska goes missing and it ultimately shows other people that time is very scarce. I think the book is a good way to show people that time matters in our life and we shouldn’t throw it away. Instead of spending all of our time trying to understand life, it symbolizes that we should spend our life trying new things and not being scared. That we should always jump into everything head first because life is too short and valuable. The book represents a giant example that we can literally die at any time.
Life is too short to dwell on mistakes we made in the past and worry about everything that will happen in the future. The book shows that we should not worry about the future, especially since we are young, because we could also die at any time. Time is valuable, but also the time for us to die does not have any limits to how old we are. I think that John Green made this book to get people out of their comfort zones and to just dive in all the way into life and not regret things that we do.
