Author's Craft in Looking for Alaska

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John Green is always very clever with his writing, particularly when it comes to writing very memorable and real characters. In his novel Looking for Alaska he does something unique with the way he constructs the book. From the beginning you open to the first page and it starts with "one hundred thirty-six days before," this sets the tone for the remainder of the novel, a tone of suspense because you know that something is going to happen but you don't yet know what. Then, a little over half-way through the novel, you find out the incident that the suspense was leading up to and the book is divided and the divisions of the story are now titled "__ days after." This way of constructing the novel helped Green get across his theme of "change" in his characters, and not just change like all people must change with time, but deep and emotional change that occurs only after a traumatic experience. The "Before" in his novel tells the story of  a pack of high school kids just going through the motions prior to having a traumatic event, whereas the "After" of the novel reveals how that event effects how those same characters act and change due to having this experience.

This change is shown by each of the main characters through their personalities and also their interactions with each other and the world. For example, Pudge (Miles), and Colonel (Chip), before the incident, have a very typical high school "I don't really give a ___" mentality on life. Their conversations revolve around drinking, smoking, and hating their social rivals "The Weekday Warriors." However after the incident takes place their  perception of life is changed and their friendship is deepened, since they have experienced a shared trauma. Their friendship in the second half of the novel is then focused more around trying to make sense of their feelings toward each other and on life. They even don't care so much about the Weekday Warriors, they're aggravated by them at times but the deep-loathing hatred for them simply isn't relevant to them anymore.

This is a novel that I feel teachers should be encouraged to teach for high-school seniors. The messages in it are very important and I feel that seniors are at the age where they can more understand the significance of change. I also would not teach the novel to anybody younger than this because I feel like some of the content is inappropriate to a younger audience given all of the sexual, drinking, and smoking scenes. I would also pose the question to them, "How has your high-school experience for you (if it had been), different from what you expected it to be as a an incoming freshman?" Green's novel provides the perfect set-up for students to analyze all the different ways we like to think to think about the way something might be and how that differs from reality. 

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