Alaska’s Lessons of Death
Death touches everyone, whether we like it or not. When reading Looking for Alaska by John Green, he forces you to see that and why we, as humans think of life after death, because we can’t handle the thought of complete nothingness. The book starts with the strange protagonist named Miles Halter and we see him start at a new school in Alabama for his junior year. He wants to find his “Great perhaps” in life and he thinks going to this school will help him find it, and it does. He meets some friends, but he particularly likes a young woman named Alaska Young, he slowly falls in love with her, but his time with her is cut short. Alaska dies in a car crash, from driving intoxicated. The rest of the book follows him …show more content…
This book, though entertaining was very knowledgeable, because it holds so much inside it’s plot. Throughout the book, the reader is seeing the death theme and how people cope with religions, anger and grief. Miles is working towards the end of the book on a paper for his religions class. He ends up writing it on his thoughts of Alaska and her passing, he writes what he has discovered through his mourning, this is where we see him understanding the main themes of the book himself. He writes about the labyrinth of suffering, which symbolizes life itself, because we are all searching for the way out of suffering, but to escape life, is death. Here, Miles states what he thinks connects the labyrinth and the religions he learned about. “ .... “the afterlife” is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable (220).” So we are all just people milling through our own labyrinths of suffering, searching for release, but most don’t like the end, the answer to their labyrinth, so they think up of ways to make their solutions easier to swallow. This book shows how humans cope with death, it showed the anger and sadness, but in the end, it showed the understanding of it, because even though none like to cope with it, we have to, in some way we all have
Death touches everyone, whether we like it or not. When reading Looking for Alaska by John Green, he forces you to see that and why we, as humans think of life after death, because we can’t handle the thought of complete nothingness. The book starts with the strange protagonist named Miles Halter and we see him start at a new school in Alabama for his junior year. He wants to find his “Great perhaps” in life and he thinks going to this school will help him find it, and it does. He meets some friends, but he particularly likes a young woman named Alaska Young, he slowly falls in love with her, but his time with her is cut short. Alaska dies in a car crash, from driving intoxicated. The rest of the book follows him …show more content…
This book, though entertaining was very knowledgeable, because it holds so much inside it’s plot. Throughout the book, the reader is seeing the death theme and how people cope with religions, anger and grief. Miles is working towards the end of the book on a paper for his religions class. He ends up writing it on his thoughts of Alaska and her passing, he writes what he has discovered through his mourning, this is where we see him understanding the main themes of the book himself. He writes about the labyrinth of suffering, which symbolizes life itself, because we are all searching for the way out of suffering, but to escape life, is death. Here, Miles states what he thinks connects the labyrinth and the religions he learned about. “ .... “the afterlife” is just something we made up to ease the pain of loss, to make our time in the labyrinth bearable (220).” So we are all just people milling through our own labyrinths of suffering, searching for release, but most don’t like the end, the answer to their labyrinth, so they think up of ways to make their solutions easier to swallow. This book shows how humans cope with death, it showed the anger and sadness, but in the end, it showed the understanding of it, because even though none like to cope with it, we have to, in some way we all have