Sup guys. Long time no see, eh?
I may have failed in updating this particular blog every day in August, but I HAVE been blogging every day in August, over at the ning. I've also kept up my end of the aforementioned collab blog (shameless self-promotion is shameless!). Really. I'm not a complete failure, I promise.
In today's FUN-FILLED Looking for Alaska-esque blog, we're going to talk about the title character: Alaska.
Even the name glistens with intrigue. Unlike Dakota or the fictional surname Montana, Alaska doesn't make me think of dry, monotonous flatland. (Sorry, Dakotas and Montana. I know you have more personality than that - but stereotypes sometimes hold my subconscious in a powerful grip...) Even my mental image of the state of Alaska is more of the icing on a cake - or the snowflakes on the ground, if you will - than a prime focus. It's certainly a tribute to John Green's writing that when I hear Alaska, my mind skips to the undefinable girl first and the northern state second...
It's also worth nothing that despite my passionate hatred (is that too harsh? Alright- very intense dislike) for Sarah Palin, I haven't thought of her in context with the book until, well, this very sentence. It's comforting to know that, unlike King Midas, she doesn't contaminate everything she touches.
I picture a tiny Alaska skittering her dust-filled fingernails over the yellowing paper surface of those slightly outdated globes as she twirls it 'round and 'round on its stand. In my mind, she's laughing as the countries speed by until they're nothing but an endless string of land, all the cultures and people toppling into one another. They're in their ethnic garb, like the kind the paper people wear on those made-for-elementary-school cartoon Earths. The girls with the braided ringlets and the raven-haired exotic dancers collapse and giggle, collapse and giggle until the bark colored furry coat wearers emerge victorious, stumbling in figure-eights as they laugh and smile and celebrate their major victory in their tiny world. And they're celebrating with Alaska: they're giving her their wide smiles and their mutual respect for each other and now they're giving her their name, her name.
I imagine as she gets older, after her own mother freezes but not from the cold, she forgets those little paper people. She fills their places with the memories of those trapped in the labyrinth, with hundreds of thousands of pages of books that she never finishes reading. I wonder how many of those hundreds of thousands of words would have told her that straight and fast is no way to get out of the labyrinth at all; that the muddle, the confusion is greatly preferable to the pain of busting out through the hedges. The pain of those she left behind, those who don't want to follow her lead and escape the labyrinth, those who would rather tangle through life until they finally, finally reach their peaceful exit.
Alaska, never content with anything less than the unexpected, doesn't freeze her own life. She pours gasoline on it and drops the match without looking back. She doesn't look where she drops the match, though, preferring to let fate decide for her. Maybe she never finds out if the match lit the blaze or if it was snuffed out by a bucket of water because she didn't stay around long enough to check. Maybe there was a moment in the car where the flames filled her eyes. I wonder if she was happy about it. I don't think she was. I don't think she was capable of being truly, completely happy. I don't think Alaska liked the fire, wanted the fire; I think she just couldn't bear the thought of being frozen, trapped in herself, like her mother. Those were the only elements she could remember: ice and fire. She forgot about the earth element, about Pudge and the Colonel and Jake. The split-decision making - her essence was her downfall, but was it really a downfall at all? She didn't make it out alive, obviously, but she died like she lived, as they say. Straight and fast.
She was only sixteen, wasn't she? Who would she have been had she survived? Would she have grown up to be a teacher? Does it matter, or is it enough to celebrate Alaska, not for what she did but for who she was - flawed, like all of us?
You're right about how we read into things based on what we're thinking about. It's fascinating that Alaska was stuck on 'straight and fast' rather than anything else. Rather than everything else.
ReplyDeleteI never saw Alaska as an unhappy person, even when she told Pudge she was. I saw her as a person, utterly undefinable but admirable and flawed, as you say, like the rest of us. But was she depressed? Or was she just troubled and uncertain like the rest of us teenagers?