John Green Short Stories And Short Stories

Is a bestselling author of Turtles All the Way Down, The Fault in Our Stars, Paper Towns, Looking for Alaska, and An Abundance of Katherines. His works also include Will Grayson, Will Grayson, Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances, and other shorter stories, and novellas. He has also performed in films as a supporting actor and has a Youtube channel (which he runs with his brother, Hank Green). Looking For Alaska was John Greens’ first novel, published in 2005. It was inspired by his experiences in school.

It was awarded many times and became a bestseller in 2012. The narrator is Miles Halter, a Floridian teenage boy, who obsessively collects people’s last words. His nickname is Miles ‘Pudge’ Halter because he is so skinny. Miles leaves his hometown to attend the Culver Creek boarding school, in Birmingham, Alabama, in hopes of finding his ‘Great Perhaps’ (his inspiration was a French poet’s, Francois Rabelais’s last words – “I go to seek a Great Perhaps.

He arrives as a smart and lonely junior. Unpopular at his old school, he is concerned about making new friends, but he becomes best friends with his roommate Chip Martin (also mentioned as The Colonel) right away. Miles also friends Lara Buterskaya, Takumi Hikohito, and the breathtakingly beautiful and mystical Alaska Young. Alaska introduces Pudge to the last words of Simón Bolívar, who died wondering how to ‘escape the labyrinth’. Alaska is dangerously wild, but she can be also withdrawn, sorrowful and downbeat. Miles spends a lot of his time trying to figure her out, understand her, unavailingly.

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Overall, still, he is thrilled to have friends. Chip introduces Miles to the social order of campus, smoking cigarettes, drinking and mischief-making. Miles tries to learn how to break the rules. They have to fend off being caught by the Eagle, the dean of the school when they are making trouble, so they don’t get punished.

Miles’s favorite class is taught by Dr. Hyde, an old man, whose nickname is the Old Man. He lectures religious studies, causing Miles to think a lot about life, religion, and philosophy in general. He adores it. When first arriving on campus, the night before school begins, Miles is pulled out of bed in the middle of the night by the Weekday Warriors (Longwell Chase, and Kevin Richman, wealthy students, who don’t board at the school), duct-taped and thrown into the school lake. Luckily, he survives. Alaska and the Colonel plan on avenging them. Later they find out that the Weekday Warriors thought that Chip had talked to the dean about two students, Marya and Paul, who have been expelled for having drunken sex and smoking marijuana. The Weekday Warriors, therefore, hurt Chip’s friend, thinking he hurt one of theirs. Alaska also wants to revenge Kevin and Longwell, because they flooded her collection of books, which she calls ‘Life’s Library.

In that semester, Miles is kicked out of Dr. Hyde’s class for daydreaming and the reason of Paul and Marya are expelled is still a secret, until one day Alaska tells her friends, that she told the dean about her roommate and her friend because the Eagle threatened her. He caught her breaking the school’s rules, and unless she gave him information about students, she would get in trouble. Her friends don’t understand her choice, because loyalty is the most important rule in the society of Culver Creek. Miles is constantly growing closer to his friends. He and Alaska spend Thanksgiving break together. They kill their time nosing around other students’ rooms, having Thanksgiving dinner at Chip’s, with his mother, and also watching porn. For Christmas, everyone goes home. After Christmas, the group starts planning their so-called ‘Barn Night’ ‘pre-prank’.

Takumi and Miles set off fireworks, distracting the Eagle, meanwhile, Chip and Alaska send fake progress reports with failing grades to Kevin’s and Longwell’s parents, and Lara puts blue dye in Kevin Richman’s hair gel and conditioner. They decide to sleep in a barn, the ‘Smoking Hole’, where they get drunk and play a game, where they tell the story of the best and worst days in their lives. Alaska wins the game, with her story, in which her mother collapses and starts shaking, and instead of calling the emergency line, she watches her mom die. This is the first time when Miles understands her moodiness. She needs to distract herself with constantly moving, constant action, to offset her freezing when her mother needed her the most. On that same night, Miles gets his first kiss from Lara and they start dating. The next day, they want to celebrate their success, so they get drunk again. This time, they play truth or dare.

Miles gets the chance (because of a dare) to get romantic with Alaska. Later on, she asks Miles ‘To be continued?’, then they all fall asleep in Alaska’s room. In the middle of the night, Alaska gets a phone call, hence she gets up to answer the ringing phone in the hallway. She returns upset, crying, begging Miles and the Colonel hysterically, to distract the dean with more fireworks. They do so, despite not knowing her intentions, while she leaves. The next morning, it is announced, that Alaska had died in a car crash the night before. The group of friends gets distant (Lara and Miles even break up) because of the trauma, except for Miles and the Colonel. They start investigating. They talk to a police officer, her boyfriend, Jake, and they even get drunk and drive down the road where Alaska died, just to find out she wanted to bring flowers to her mothers grave because she forgot her death’s anniversary which was on the day before Alaska had died in a car crash. What they did not find out was whether Alaska intended to kill herself, or not.