"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 the future keeps you going, but you'll never do it. You just use the future to escape the present." This quote from the award winning book, Looking for Alaska tells us everything we need to know. it defines the book in a way that no one else could in words. Looking for Alaska is all about choice, all about how the choices that we make affect the people in our lives. Although each person is undeniably an individual, choices that one makes affect not only the person making the decisions, but also those close to them and from there, it ripples down to all who hear their stories. .
On the surface, Alaska young had everything going for her; good looks, popularity and people who cared for her. Everyone knew of Alaska Young. Beautiful,.
smart and mysterious in her own way, never letting people truly know her. What you learn about Alaska is not what is important. What is important are the things that you do not learn about her, all the signs that you didn't pick up on or didn't notice. She may have seemed fearless on the outside, but she was anything but that. She was more than just sad, she had a darkness that consumed her, a darkness that most people did not realize. After she died, her friends began to see the signs. They realized how closed off she had been, how she never wanted to talk about herself or her feelings and warning signs that she had left in her books. There were warning signs that we often don't see. For Alaska, she just needed someone to dig a little deeper. .
We are quick to make irrational decisions however; we don't understand how those decisions will affect those who care about us. In that moment, when Alaska was faced with the decision of life or death, that moment when she was staring into the headlights of the car in front of her and she had a brief moment to make a decision, I do not believe she thought about the feelings of her loved ones or how heavily they would be affected by her death.
