Before.
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Take a gulp of the warm, intoxicating Strawberry Hill and a drag on a cheap cigarette without the overarching, eagle-like principal spotting you. Boom. Welcome to Culver Creek High School, where the dead Alabama heat will pull the perspiration from your body and the curriculum will pound the life out of you. It’s a school divided by the rich and poor where students will figure out how to "get out of this labyrinth of suffering". John Green has created a new home for Miles “Pudge” Halter for his senior year of high school in his novel, Looking for Alaska.
Pudge is a scrawny, nerdy Florida boy who has no social graces due to a lack of friends throughout his life. But, everything changes at the Creek. He falls face-forward into a friend group. These friends teach him some interesting skills: how to pull pranks on enemies, how to get revenge on enemies who have pranked you, where to smoke and drink without getting caught by the principal (the Eagle), how to get thrown out of a gym during a basketball game, etc.
Pudge’s friends take a socially awkward 18-year-old boy and change him into a slightly less socially awkward 18-year-old boy who drinks and smokes. Green magnetically pulls four other seniors, and the reader, into Pudge’s experience at Culver Creek.
Takumi is not your stereotypical Asian friend. He can’t do calculus to save his soul, but he can hack into any computer and bust a rap faster and better than Tupac. Takumi is somewhat of a conscience for Pudge. He informs Pudge of the good and bad secretes about his friends. However, Pudge and the audience never truly get to know Takumi…but, do we every truly know someone?
Lara is Pudge’s Romanian “girlfriend”. It’s a childish relationship. The only thing he knows about her is that she’s good at kissing and giving blowjobs. Lara and Pudge never really talk. They’re too alike in character to have a balanced relationship; they are both thinkers and not talkers. No matter how cute she may be with her slight accent, Lara doesn’t compare to Alaska in Pudge’s mind.
Alaska is the most moody and yet the most “gorgeous…. [and] endlessly fascinating” girl. Pudge’s life isn’t the same after meeting her, but it’s up to the reader to decide if it’s for better or worse. She is a perpetual mystery. Both a talker and a thinker, she gets Pudge to speak his mind. She’s a cigarette, alcohol and sex addict with a passion for books. She smokes and drinks too much and drives too fast, and Pudge is completely in love with her—or rather, the concept of her. Alaska is a mix of beauty and smarts with an Ophelia-esque spark of rebellion and insanity in her, and that’s what makes her so dangerous.
Chip “The Colonel” Martin is a short, fiery tempered, vodka and milking drinking Alabama boy, and if he and Pudge were any closer, their relationship would be considered homosexual. The Colonel immediately takes Pudge under his wing after his arrival to the Creek. He is Pudge’s first real friend…well, if you consider someone who forcefully makes you an accomplice in smuggling cigarettes and spiking the milk with vodka a real friend. However, he keeps Pudge sane after.
After.
Life can’t go back to the way it was. Pudge has been lured into the “Great Perhaps”, and like a puff of smoke from Alaska’s cigarette, he fades into the void.
Looking for Alaska is much like a hurricane. Standing in the eye, there is a brief, calm period. The wind soon picks up. Only remnants of the past are left to uncover the mystery. However, “at some point, you just pull off the band-aid and it hurts but then it’s over and you’re relieved”. It’s story about how people “spend [their] whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how [they’ll] escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imaging that future keeps [them] going, but [they] never do it. [They] just use the future to escape the present”. In a perpetual state of hope, or “to be continued”, Pudge learns to accept the present, and is left to choose the story of the past. John Green teaches his audience how stand the storm, and how to clean up after the hurricane passes, because “when you stop wishing things wouldn’t fall apart, you’d stop suffering when they did”. John Green’s words entice the reader like a bottle of liquor to the adolescent; we needn’t be afraid of the hurricane, and “we need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken”.
