Looking For Alaska

By John Green

In real life and narrative fiction, characters use ice cream or pouring their feelings into a journal to help them cope with hardships that they've been going through, but the teenagers in Looking for Alaska by John Green, use drinking and smoking as coping mechanisms. The students at Culver Creek boarding school have been sent to the school for many reasons, to be taught responsibility, independence, and to mature as people. This can be stressful to teens, they don’t have the support they normally get from their parents, they are having to uproot their normal lives and move to a boarding school were they have to meet new people and make more friends. The students often resort to drinking and smoking to help them with social, academic and personal conflicts.
            As a teenager, kids have stressful lives, between succeeding in school, life at home, their social lives and maturing into the people they will grow up to be. The character the Colonel was dumped by his girlfriend, Sara, he copes by drinking his homemade cocktail, ambrosia (vodka mixed with milk). Also the character Alaska in Looking for Alaska uses drinking to help with the grieving of the death of her mother. It’s even harder for Alaska because her father blamed the death of her mother on Alaska “Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die.” Alaska says to the main character Miles (Pudge). Although the author is a little extreme with the portrayal of teenagers drinking and smoking, John Green still shows the readers how some teenagers act in times of remorse.In July of this year my grandma died. I was in utter shock. As a way of coping I would just laze around not doing anything, like my dad on the weekends. I would not think or speak of anyone who reminded me of her, I would be dismissive of any conversations about her, and I would shut anyone out who tried to talk to me about my “feelings”. I seemed like a baby, only sleeping, eating, and crying, not able to speak. Now looking back on what happened, I realize that the best way to get over an issue is to try not to control the situation, but instead to accept and move on. The character Alaska blames herself for her mother’s death “When she cried and told me that she f****d everything up, I knew what she meant.” Pudge says upon hearing the story about Alaska’s mom, instead of grieving about how Alaska should’ve saved her mother, I believe that Alaska should accept that she can’t change the events that happened in the past and move on and make the best of the situation, but instead Alaska is hung up on the past and because she gets so wrapped up in her mom’s death, she kills herself.  I believe that this is the true message that the author sends to the readers by having the characters have to get over the death of Alaska.