Labyrinth In Alaska

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Many people enjoy calmness. They don’t relish the thought of going on an adventure, they would rather do what is expected of them. Although, Miles “Pudge” Halter was boring, he had his mind set on leaving the expectations and starting his own journey. Pudge’s obsession with famous last words drove him to seek the last words of Francois Rabelais “I go to see the Great Perhaps” Which meant to leave your comfort zone. These last words began Pudge journey to the unbalanced yet adventurous environment that is Culver Creek boarding school. This school is the epitome of the “Great Perhaps”, and if his life could not be more turned upside down, he meets Alaska Young. Alaska is a bad influence and completely different than Pudge, yet she takes

For example, Alaska explains to Pudge how you can get stuck in the labyrinth. “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 that future keeps you going, but you never do it. You just use the future to escape the present” (John Green, 54). In this passage Alaska expounds how you can get caught in the labyrinth. Alaska elucidates that the labyrinth is life and you can get caught in the suffering of life but work to move forward to change your past. Alaska’s views change what Pudge thinks about the suffering of life and how, just like labyrinths, suffering is a maze which is hard to navigate. Another example that states how Alaska influenced Pudge’s view that suffering throughout life is a labyrinth is when she describes to Pudge what the labyrinth is to her. “It’s not life or death, the

Alaska shows Pudge her way to escape the labyrinth which causes him to realize his own way of escaping the labyrinth. For instance, Pudge realized how Alaska chose to leave her labyrinth of suffering. “The whole passage was underlined in bleeding, water-soaked black ink. But there was another ink, this one a crisp blue, post-flood, and the arrow lead from ‘How will I ever get out of this labyrinth?’ to a margin note written in her loop-heavy cursive: Straight and Fast”(John Green, 156). In this passage Pudge realized that Alaska had chosen her own way out of suffering. “Straight and Fast”, Alaska had so much suffering she took her only way out, which was death. She decided that “Straight and Fast” was the way out of her own suffering. Everyone has their own unique way, and sometimes their ways change. In this piece of evidence Pudge had thought he figured out how to get through this own suffering, Although after meeting Alaska his course changed. “Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in a back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home. But that only lead to a lonely life accompanied only by the last words of the already-dead, so I came here looking for a Great Perhaps”(John Green, 219). Pudge may have found a easy way to stay in the labyrinth of