Looking for Alaska

Looking For Alaska Book Report – Eulogy Hello everyone. I would like to thank you all for coming to honor our friend, Alaska Young. I am Miles Halter, known to most as Pudge. I transferred to Culver Creek Boarding School from Florida to ‘seek a Great Perhaps’, to leave behind the insignificant things I was doing, to seek something that was perhaps greater. I collect people’s dying words and “I go to seek a Great Perhaps”, were the last words of Francois Rabelais, but unlike him, I did not want to wait to die to start seeking it.

This school has given me very many of my firsts: first friend, first dose of mischief and the first and last girl. Alaska was the most enigmatic and mysterious person I have ever met. Every element of her being fascinated me, from her smell of cigarettes, vanilla and sweat, her creativity when planning pranks on our headmaster, her surprising ability to succeed in pre–calculus, and her obsession with strawberry wine, which we had to drink in secrecy. The first time I had a real conversation with her she told me the last words of Simon Bolivar, which I had never heard before “Damn it, how will I ever get out of this labyrinth! When I asked her what the labyrinth was, she told me that that was the mystery. Is the labyrinth living or dying? Are we all trying to escape the world, or the end of it? This quote completely juxtaposes my Great Perhaps, I looked to seek and she looked to escape. After she died I found a note in one of her books in her ‘life long library’, a collection of books that she had bought from garage sales that she had been accumulating ever since she was young. She had written that the only way out of the labyrinth was straight and fast.

Alaska taught me to live in the moment and not to plan ahead. She said “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 the future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present. ” (John Green, Looking For Alaska) I know people have whispered among themselves wondering whether Alaska’s death was a suicide or a pure accident. I have been wondering the same.

People who do not know Alaska may see her death as selfish, seeing the people close to her terribly heart broken. I have to clear her name. When Alaska was 8 years old, she watched her mother having a seizure and pass away. Alaska was frozen in fear and did not call 911 and she never forgave herself. The day Alaska died, was the anniversary of her mother’s birthday. Alaska had been drinking and I remember her waking up in the middle of the night cursing and crying, telling us that we had to distract our headmaster so she could drive to her mother’s grave.

She crashed into a truck on her way without any attempt to turn the car. I realize now the labyrinth was not life or death, it was suffering, doing wrong and having wrong things happen to you. How do you get out of the labyrinth of suffering? Alaska chose straight and fast, whether it was on purpose or not. I knew Alaska for one hundred and thirty – six days, but I do not think anyone truly knew her. Her death threw me into the realization that I have always been trapped in a labyrinth of suffering.

Before I got to this point, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend it did not exist, but to build a small, self – sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze to pretend that I was not lost, but home. I hated Alaska and I hated everything for a while after she was gone. I hated myself for being a coward and not stopping her from leaving that night. It all just felt so terribly unfair, all of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back, but can not due to deadness.

I loved Alaska because she showed me both my labyrinth and my Great Perhaps – she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave my minor life for grander maybes, and now she is gone and with her my faith in perhaps. Alaska is still teaching me a lesson; the only way out of the labyrinth is to forgive. I wish Alaska had realized this too before it had to end this way. Her mother forgave her; just as I am sure Alaska forgives all of us now. You see “we are all going, nothing can last, not even the earth itself. (John Green, Looking For Alaska) The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. So when you stopped wishing things would not fall apart, you would stop suffering when they did. So Alaska, I have some last words for you, Thomas Edison’s, “It’s very beautiful over there. ” I do not know where there is, but I believe it is somewhere and I hope it is beautiful. After all of this I will learn no more last words because I know so many, but I will never know hers.

“How will we ever get out of this labyrinth of suffering? ” I believe suffering is something ones self is born with. When we give our first steps in this world we soon realize there is struggle and the struggle is ever lasting in ones life. Alaska Young was brought down with the suffering in her life.

The labyrinth of her life dragged her down and the question of escaping the labryitnh would not leave her mind. She broke. Alaska got out of her labyrinth “straight and fast. ” Maybe getting out of the labyrinth of suffering is forgiveness just like pudge believes.If one holds on to hatred and pain then it grows and it eats away your every whim. Pudge needed to answer this question not only for his class assement but he needed to answer it for himself. He knows as well as I do that Alaska is gone forever and he may never know why or how she died.

Pudge knows that to get out of his labyrinth of suffereing he needs to forgive Alaska. He needs to forgive her to be able to continue mazing through the labrynth of his life. Pudge needs to forgive her to get to happiness.The answer to this question lingers in my mind,will I get out of this labryith of suffering? I am not sure at all. I know there is always a smile in darkness, and I can forgive and forget just as Pudge forgives Alaska. Maybe even after death there will still be the labryitnh of suffering. Or maybe after death the suffering ends.

The first steps we give in death are probably not a struggle at all. Unlike Alaska I don’t want to find the answer just yet. I rather linger on it and learn or wonder. I will not find a way out “straight and fast. At some point in life “Everyone…gets dragged out to sea by the undertow…we are all going. ” In other words, at some point in time we know we are going to die/suffer or someone we love and care for is going to die, how do we deal with this knowledge? Right now Miles’ answer is to believe in an afterlife, however Miles becomes enlightened and he changes his outlook on surviving the Labyrinth. Something similar to a parable/riddle is then introduced in the novel after Miles makes his inital decision about surviving the Labyrinth.

The parable is: Banzan “Was walking through the market one day when he overheard someone ask a butcher for his best piece of meat. The butcher answered, “Everything in my shop is the best. You cannot find a piece of meat that is not the best. ” Upon hearing this, Banzan realized that there is no best and no worst, that those judgments have no real meaning because there is only what is, and poof he reached enlightenment. ” How does this relate to the central question of surviving the labyrinth of suffering?Well Alaska spent her life after her mom’s death thinking about the best and worst times in her life constantly. This parable is directly related to when Alaska suggested that they play the “Best Day/Worst Day” game when out camping with her friends. There she shares the worst day of her life that has overshadowed everything she did thereafter.

The world religions teacher then introduces a zen belief that “Everything that comes together falls apart. ” In other words death will happen…”we are all going”…it is inevitable…therefore suffering will only cease when we stopped wishing things would not fall apart.Alaska could not do this and so she did not survive. She could not survive. The problem is not life but how much emphasis we put on disappointment, pain, and laying blame while trying to hold ourselves together; creating a sense of hopelessness. Miles then becomes truly enlightened when he realizes that the only way to survive the labyrinth of suffering is to forgive. When Alaska’s mother died she blamed and could not forgive herself for something that was out of her control and this is what caused her to self-destruct.

Similarly, Miles blamed himself for the death of Alaska as he felt he should have stopped her from getting in her car drunk…if only he had stopped her! This thought haunted him but then he realized: “She forgave us, and that we had to forgive to survive in the labyrinth. There were so many of us who would have to live with things done and things left undone that day. Things that did not go right, things that seemed okay at the time because we could not see the future. If only we could see the endless string of consequences that result from our smallest actions.But we can’t know better until knowing better is useless. ” So I ask again: What is the best way to go about being a person? What are the rules of this game, and how might we best play it? How do we survive as oppsed to escape the labyrinth of suffering? According to Miles it is to forgive. Stop beating yourself up for elements of your life that are outside of your control such as death.

Forgive yourself and others for the unfortunate things that happen in life and accept what is.