Key themes
- How we create mythologies around people — and what we miss
- The impossibility of fully knowing another person
- Grief as a demand for meaning that can't be met
About this book
Before. Miles “Pudge” Halter is done with his safe life at home. His whole life has been one big non-event, and his obsession with famous last words has only made him crave “the Great Perhaps” even mo
Published in 2005 as Green's debut, Looking for Alaska won the Michael L. Printz Award and was one of the most influential YA novels of its decade. The autobiographical elements (Green's own boarding school experience) are extensively documented.
Discussion questions
- Miles is obsessed with last words — the final, meaning-making statements of the dying. How does this obsession relate to what happens when Alaska dies, and what the novel says about our desire for meaning?
- Alaska is one of fiction's great 'manic pixie dream girl' characters — a trope that the novel may be perpetuating or may be critiquing. How do you read her — as a real person or as a projection?
- The novel is divided into Before and After, with the event we know is coming announced by its countdown. How does this structure affect the first half — does knowing something terrible is coming change what you see in the apparently ordinary days?
- The question 'How will we escape this labyrinth of suffering?' runs through the novel. How does the novel answer it — or refuse to?
- Looking for Alaska was one of the most challenged books in American schools for years. Having read it, what do you think the objections were — and are they reasonable?
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