Looking for Alaska RRE

The Labyrinth

“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia…You spend your whole life stuck in the labyrinth, thinking about how you'll escape it one day, and how awesome it will be, and imagining that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present.”  In the book Looking for Alaska By: John Green, a boy named Miles goes to boarding school and meets people that change his life, especially a girl named Alaska. Throughout the book I noticed that Alaska quoted the last words; “How will I get out of this Labyrinth!” Later in the book it became clear the Labyrinth symbolized life and things that happened in it.  Alaska tried to avoid things in life she did not want to think about which led her to a bad place. When this happens Miles tries to avoid the things in the “Labyrinth” he doesn’t want to think about but he eventually realizes that when Alaska ended up not continuing on in the “Labyrinth” when she tried to do this. Miles learns that you have to let the person you failed forgive you, you have to forgive yourself and you have to move on in life despite what happened.

Everyone makes mistakes.  They can be big or small, but you usually feel guilty. Sometimes the guilt is just too much and it effects how you feel about everyday life. In Looking for Alaska the main character, Miles, has to learn that you have to forgive and forget. An example of this is; “When she f*** up, all those years ago, just a little girl terrified into paralysis, she collapsed into the enigma of herself. And I could have done that, but I saw where that led for her.” This is important because Miles realized that he needed to forget/get over her death and his part in it or the same thing would happen to him that happened to Alaska. Another piece of evidence that shows that Miles now knows that he has to get over/forgive himself and let himself forget her is “Because I will forget her, yes. That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive me for my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom. I know now that she forgives me for being dumb and scared and doing the dumb and scared thing. I know that she forgives me just as her mother forgives her.”  As Miles realizes this the book concludes because he learned a big lesson about forgiveness.

The primary them of Looking for Alaska  is forgiveness and continuing on in the Labyrinth of life no matter how much you don’t want to and you have to keep on continuing. This is a good lesson for teenagers because a lot of teenagers make mistakes and everyone handles it in a lot of different ways but Looking for Alaska shows how you need to move past your mistakes.