Paper Towns by John Green
Paper Towns is an award-winning novel by John Green. The novel is a story set in a small town in Orlando, Florida. The story is narrated by and follows the main character, Quentin. As the reader follows Quentin we learn about how he thinks and more importantly how much he likes a certain girl, who he hasn’t spoken to since they were kids. But one night, she leads him on an adventure until dawn and then disappears the next day. The focus of this analysis is to identify the use of conventional, structural and linguistic features; the interplay between how the text is written and the central ideas, and to identify the context in which the text was created and what the reader brings to the text. …show more content…
The use of metaphors of similes is a linguistic feature because it is to do with the language in the book. “I feel like this is an important idea, one of those ideas that your brain must wrap itself around slowly, the way pythons eat” (p. 257) This quote is representative of Quentin's character and growth throughout the book. His realisations are a gradual process, made up of smaller realisations built up over time. In the book, strings are referred to commonly, in the quote on the last page of Paper Towns, Quentin talks, metaphorically, of the strings of instrument that allow people to make music together, even if broken. "We play the broken strings of our instruments one last time" (p. 305). As the story is told in first person, this style of writing allows for the reader to know what Quentin is thinking, this is a conventional feature of the book, because it is to do with the form of the how the text is …show more content…
“Like Q, I definitely romanticized the girls I liked and the girls I had crushes on and I thought of them as more than human. That ends up being really destructive I think, not just to you, but also to the women you're imagining. Like if you think of them as more than human, it's dehumanizing to them in a way, so that is definitely taken from my own life.” This is important because it shows the reader that the text was created in a context that is very real. Different readers bring different characteristics and ideas to novels. For the novel Paper Towns a reader brings their own predictions and opinions about characters, especially Quentin and Margo. The more predications a reader makes on the plot means the more engaged they are. John Green has created an atmosphere that is both calm and suspenseful. The reader can make the book better because they feel more immersed when the are thinking about the future events that may or may not