"Looking for Alaska" by John Green - analysis of characters and themes

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Deshan Thaver

Grade 11 JH, 10/10/2012

Author:

 John Green lives in Indianapolis, Indiana. Until recently he lived in New York, but grew up in Florida before moving to boarding school in Alabama. Prior to becoming a writer he worked as a book reviewer and a writer for the radio. Looking for Alaska is his first novel published in 2005. His most recent novel, due in 2008, is Paper Towns. John believes to be a writer you should be a reader too. He is religious and considered being a minister, he worked in a children’s hospital as a Chaplin, which is where he “started to think about writing a story in which teenagers experience loss and a consuming guilt that cannot be easily assuaged.”

Main characters

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Plot:

Sixteen-year-old Miles "Pudge" Halter has no friends at his Florida high school. He instead loses himself in biographies of writers (though not their works). He is especially interested in the last words of famous people.
Tired of his safe life, Miles asks his parents to allow him to attend Culver Creek, a boarding school in Alabama, which his father had once attended. There, for the first time in his life, he makes friends. He drinks, smokes, plays pranks, gets a girlfriend, and finally fits in. Throughout it all, he cannot get over a girl named Alaska Young. Funny ...

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