Quote 21
"So why don't you go home for vacations?" I asked her.
"I'm just scared of ghosts, Pudge. And home is full of them." (58before.48-49)
Giant clue about Alaska here—ghosts imply a lack of security, a lack of safety that we generally want to associate with home. What emotions, given what we know about her at this point in the book, does Alaska associate with home?
Quote 22
We laughed and drank our wine, and then after the meal, we each listed our gratitudes. My family always did that before the meal, and we all just rushed through it to get to the food. So the four of us sat around the table and shared our blessings. I was thankful for the fine food and the fine company, for having a home on Thanksgiving. "A trailer, at least," Dolores joked. (46before.2)
Thanksgiving with the Colonel reminds Miles of Thanksgiving with his parents. What exactly is it about the experience that makes it feel like home for Miles? (Hint: Think about rituals and traditions.)
Quote 23
I sat in the back of the hatchback on the drive home—and that is how I thought of it: home—and fell asleep to the highway's monotonous lullaby. (46before.7)
Miles moves from one home to another. What makes Culver Creek a home to him? What about the place, the people, the traditions, and the emotions create a sense of home to Miles?
Quote 24
Screw this, I thought, and for the first time, I imagined just going back home, ditching the Great Perhaps for the old comforts of school friends. (13after.36)
Ultimately Miles chooses to stay at the Creek, but he thinks about the comforts of home and how they are both welcome but also limiting. So now we have to think about what home means to Miles by the end of the novel.
Quote 25
"I'm fine, Mom. I think—if it's okay with you, I think I might stay here for Thanksgiving. A lot of my friends are staying"—lie—"and I have a lot of work to do"—double lie. "I had no idea how hard the classes would be, Mom"—truth. (58before. 24)
Before he left for his Great Perhaps Miles never really lied to his parents, but now he's mixing lies and truth. What has made this okay for him? How does he justify deception in his mind?
Quote 26
"The Colonel and I will work that out. No need to get you into trouble—yet."
"Oh. Okay. Um, I'm gonna go for a cigarette, then."
I left. It wasn't the first time Alaska had left me out of the loop, certainly, but after we'd been together so much over Thanksgiving, it seemed ridiculous to plan the prank with the Colonel but without me. (8before.25-27)
Miles is learning that lying and deception carry a lot of emotional weight, but he also knows that Alaska likes to portray herself as mysterious and unknowable. With her behavior, can he ever really know who Alaska is?
Quote 27
"She got drunk," I told her. "The Colonel and I went to sleep, and I guess she drove off campus." And that became the standard lie. (2after.42)
People lie for different reasons, and Miles and the Colonel lie to others about their role in Alaska's death. So we wonder if they also lie to themselves about the extent to which they were involved in her death.
Quote 28
And I almost said, She buried it in the woods out by the soccer field, but I realized that the Colonel didn't know, that she never took him to the edge of the woods and told him to dig for buried treasure, that she and I had shared that alone, and I kept it for myself like a keepsake, as if sharing the memory might lead to its dissipation. (7after.20)
Miles decides to keep a secret about Alaska. More than the memory, why might he want to share something with Alaska that no one else had? What does this reveal about the extent to which Miles has accepted the lies and deceit that are sometimes part and parcel of friendship?
Quote 29
He was quiet for a long time, and I looked down at Alaska's last daisy and waited for him to ask what the prank was, and I would have told him, but I just heard him breathe slowly into the phone, and then he said, "I won't even ask. Hmm." He sighed. "Swear to God you'll never tell your mother." (84after.13)
Deception isn't just confined to students at Culver Creek, and Miles asks his dad to play a pretty deceptive role in the Alaska Young Memorial Prank. How do lying and deception differ between the students at the Creek and the adults who lie in the novel? Why do both groups deceive others?
Quote 30
The hardest part about pranking, Alaska told me once, is not being able to confess. But I could confess on her behalf now. And as I slowly made my way out of the gym, I told anyone who would listen, "No. It wasn't us. It was Alaska." (102after.40)
Even when Miles is deceiving others about the memorial prank, in some ways he's telling the truth. The question though, is if other people will believe him or want to believe the deception he and his friends create. How do he and other characters come to terms with deception toward the end of the novel?
Quote 31
I lay on my back with my knees hanging over the precipice and screamed. I screamed because the Colonel was a self-satisfied, condescending bastard, and I screamed because he was right, for I did want to believe that I'd had a secret love affair with Alaska. Did she love me? Would she have left Jake for me? Or was it just another impulsive Alaska moment? (20after.17)
The death of a loved one often leaves us with unanswered questions, and part of the suffering that comes with death is the fact that these questions will never be answered. What realizations does Miles have about his suffering at this moment in the novel? Miles suffers because of these uncertainties in addition to his guilt… and he suffers because Alaska wasn't who he wanted her to be.
Quote 32
The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did. (51after.3)
Yet again the Old Man's class and lectures provide Miles a way to think about healing from Alaska's death and the guilt he feels about it. Miles starts to think about his desire—for Alaska, for himself—and the idea that everything changes. The question is whether Miles will be able to accept the falling-apart-ness of the world enough to heal.
Quote 33
That which came together will fall apart imperceptibly slowly, and I will forget, but she will forgive my forgetting, just as I forgive her for forgetting me and the Colonel and everyone but herself and her mom in those last moments she spent as a person. (136after.14)
Miles realizes that forgiveness is his way out of the labyrinth of suffering, and he mourns his realization that Alaska was never able to forgive herself for her role in her mother's death. This is not the same view as the Colonel's take on suffering. Think about how the ways to deal with suffering are presented in the book and which are most in line with your own beliefs.
Quote 34
"The day after my mom took me to the zoo where she liked the monkeys and I liked the bears, it was a Friday. I came home from school. She gave me a hug and told me to go do my homework in my room so I could watch TV later. I went into my room, and she sat down at the kitchen table, I guess, and then she screamed, and I ran out, and she had fallen over. She was lying on the floor, holding her head and jerking. And I freaked out. I should have called 911, but I just started screaming and crying until finally she stopped jerking, and I thought she had fallen asleep and that whatever had hurt didn't hurt anymore. So I just sat there on the floor with her until my dad got home an hour later." (2before.67)
Sleep and death are often symbolically related in literature, and this novel is no exception. Alaska's first experience with death occurred when she was only eight years old, and she's been feeling the weight of guilt and her own mortality ever since. Heavy stuff, both emotionally and psychologically.
Quote 35
I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and toward the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go, too! I want to go, too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going." (2before.76)
Once Miles learns of the death of Alaska's mom, he ponders the inevitability of death, but he forgets that mortality comes to us all when Alaska dies. So we have a split here—Miles knows that we all die, but he has no idea what death brings in its wake to the living. Poor guy ends up finding out, though.
Quote 36
"But a lot of times, people die how they live. And so last words tell me a lot about who people were, and why they became the sort of people biographies get written about. Does that make sense?" (thelastday.45)
This is what makes the fact that Miles never knows Alaska's last words so devastating—he believes that last words offer insight into life. He wants to truly know Alaska, and arguably he never really does because of both circumstances and the fact that she doesn't allow it to happen.
Quote 37
The Colonel and I are walking back to our dorm room in silence. I am staring at the ground beneath me. I cannot stop thinking that she is dead, and I cannot stop thinking that she cannot possibly be dead. People do not just die. (thedayafter.42)
But they do, and Miles knows they do. What Miles is experiencing here is what many people who have loved ones die experience: a sense of disbelief that death could touch his life. And Miles realizes this later on—he acknowledges that he and other teenagers are indestructible in his final essay for the Old Man because their spirits live on. So then we have to wonder whether the statement "people do not just die" is true because we question what death really is and means.
Quote 38
I couldn't believe what I had done to him, his eyes glittering green like Alaska's but sunk deep into dark sockets, like a green-eyed, still-breathing ghost, and don't no don't don't die, Alaska. Don't die. (6after.11)
The death Miles is referring to here is physical, yes, but also relates much more to the living than to Alaska. The guilt Miles feels regarding his role in her death would dissipate if only Alaska were alive, and here we see death tied to the suffering of the living.
Quote 39
"I was just thinking—Why do you run head-on into a cop car with its lights on? and then I thought, Well, she hated authority figures."
The Colonel laughed. "Hey, look at that. Pudge made a funny!" (14after.15-16)
One way people cope with death is to approach it with humor because it decreases the power and the pain that death—and suffering—can bring. What about Miles's personality, though, makes the joke he makes a little surprising?
Quote 40
In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again. (51after.4)
There's a great deal of truth in Miles's thoughts here. Alaska already physically died, so what exactly is dying now? Will she, or anyone, ever truly die?