Looking For Alaska Character Analysis

The Climax: Looking for Alaska
The climax of a story is when all of the events come to a breaking point. It greatly affects the characters and story. For example, the novel Looking for Alaska by John Green illustrates Miles Walter’s journey of seeking the “Great Perhaps” and escaping the “labyrinth.” In the story, Miles Walter experiences various daring experiences as he makes new friends and moves to a boarding school. He reaches a peak in his life and isn’t looking back, however, all of the fun and love comes crashing down one drunken night. That night immensely changes both Miles Walter and the story.
Miles Walter, later renamed Pudge by the Colonel, has always been an outlier, in a different world, compared to his normal high school classmates. Therefore, he decides to go to the boarding school, Culver Creek, to find his identity and the Great Perhaps. On his first night there, Pudge is tied up and thrown into a river by the Weekday Warriors, a group of rich students who attend the school. At the school, he meets bright and colorful people like the Colonel and
Alaska Young who help him survive at the school. Before he knows it, all three of them are behind the school smoking, drinking, and planning and pulling pranks on a normal basis. Throughout the school year, Pudge begins to fall in love with Alaska, who has a boyfriend. He also realizes that she is emotionally unstable after learning she got her own friend expelled to save herself.
Pudge, the Colonel, and Alaska successfully pull a series of meticulously planned pranks to provoke the Weekday Warriors.
Afterward, when they are drunk, Alaska tells the others about her mother’s death when she was a little girl and her guilt for not calling 911 even though she did not understand what was happening. To celebrate their success, they decide to drink every night. During the last night, Pudge and Alaska kiss and almost have sex, but Alaska is too tired to continue. In the middle of the night, she receives a call that makes her go crazy and hysterical. In a frenzy, Alaska makes Pudge and the Colonel help her get off campus without telling them the reason. The next morning, the two hungover boys find out that Alaska was in a car accident and killed instantly. In an attempt to clear their conscious, Pudge and the Colonel try to discover the true meaning of what had happened that fateful
night.
Alaska’s death, the climax, changes everything about the story. The novel, somehow, slows down after the climax. It is no longer about a young and carefree life, but rather the effects of losing a life, and in such a mysterious manner, too. The climax, in the context of this novel, acts as an eye-opener for the characters, like taking blindfolds off. An example being when the Colonel accuses Pudge of only loving the Alaska that he imagined and not the person that was actually in front of him; Pudge soon realizes the truth in what the Colonel said. Her death also helps him figure out that the “labyrinth” is a person’s pain and suffering.
Looking for Alaska unfolds a person’s suffering and their way out. The novel’s climax, Alaska Young’s death, majorly changes the direction of the novel. In the story, the events all start to fall down and come together after the climax. Though at first it was full of carefree events, the climax instantly reshaped it into a gloomy and depressing feel. The characters’ perspectives were also greatly affected as well. Their minds have opened up to the harsh reality of pain.