Surviving the Labyrinth: Looking for Alaska

So I finished reading John Green's Looking for Alaska and I have decided it is great. The book is told from the perspective of Miles who enters his first year at Culver Creek boarding school. At the beginning of the novel, Miles is perhaps the most boring and uninteresting narrator ever. Coming from a school where he had zero friends, he is quickly befriended by the Colonel, Takumi, and the beautiful but wild Alaska. The three form an eclectic and, for the administration, often troublesome group that you can't help but like. When the group is faced with an unexpected death, everything changes and those left behind must struggle to make sense of their loss.

This novel presents an engaging story and it does so with literary merit. It is beautifully crafted and will make you laugh as well as cry. Early in the novel, Alaska asks the question, "How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering?" and this becomes the overarching theme of the novel. Green engages the darkness or the labyrinth. Alaska was haunted by the darkness of her mother's death and her own feelings of guilt, pain, and shame. Instead of dealing with her past, she runs from it in the most self-destructive ways possible. She is incapable of accepting and making peace with what happened, but the fact is, it happened and it is not going to go away. Miles, in the end, recognizes this. He felt the darkness also, of his own failure and guilt and pain but instead of running from it, he eventually acknowledges what happened and that he is not wholly to blame. He goes through the pain and darkness and finds forgiveness. It is a fact of life that bad things will happen, you will make bad decisions, it is part of life, of growing up. You can't outrun the darkness, and to attempt to do so will only lead to self-destruction and suffering. You have to engage the labyrinth, the darkness. You have to forgive. Miles will still deal with the intense pain, but he doesn't drown in the suffering, and there is a big difference between the two. In the end, he realizes that you can't just pretend the labyrinth does not exist and you can't flee from it. You have to recognize its existence and live within it and it is no longer merely a labyrinth of suffering that we are trapped in but becomes a complex world full of possibilities.

This book portrayed the chaos of unexpected death and the corresponding feelings of guilt and pain well without crossing the line into the melodramatic. Eventually Miles finds his answer and it is the truthful one: sometimes there is not an answer. Life is not a math equation, one must live with uncertainty. It's something everyone can relate to.