It Depends on What Your Definition of Moral Is
The debate over the moralizing (or immoralizing) in "Looking for Alaska" rages on Amazon. (And when I say rages, I mean that there are two posts, but I find them interesting.) What say you, readers? Is "Alaska" too moral? Not moral enough? Or the only truth in fiction is inherently amoral? (My views on the subject, as Rudy Giuliani would say, have evolved.)
In other debating news:
The debate between zombies and unicorns has moved from Justine Larbalestier's brilliant blog to the small screen of Brotherhood 2.0.
The debate between whether Hank or I is the superior vlogger continues in My Pants. And best of all, now that Brotherhood 2.0 has made the switch to a new server, we can handle more traffic. So head over and get back to commenting.
posted by John Green @ Tuesday, October 09, 2007
14 Comments
14 Comments:
Wow, I didn't agree with that review on Amazon at all. The review made Alaska sound so cut and dry, "they did this, and then this happened...and that's a bad thing." And Alaska wasn't like that at all!! I really believe the person read the book for the wrong reasons, and simply weren't willing to open their eyes past a certain point.
Wow. This is just like that time when I was in my 19th Century Lit class and we were discussing the spontaneous combustion scene in Bleak House and my professor turned to the class and said "Now, what do you think Dickens's prominent use of slime in this scene says about his fear of female genitalia?" and my brain just died. Okay, well, maybe this is a little different, but I am left with the same feeling:
I can see point A (slime appears in a scene or, in your case, someone dies while driving drunk) and point B (Charles Dickens had an unconscious fear of the female genitalia, John Green wrote this book to tell you drinking is BAD and WRONG) but am at a loss to understand how, without A LOT OF OTHER POINTS IN THERE SOMEWHERE, you get from one point to the other.
::coughcough::Justine's name typo::coughcough::
I think I'm probably the only one, but for some reason when I try to get to B2.0 now (using Safari) I get an eror message saying that the server doesn't exist...
By the way, zombies rule. http://www.halfwaytohuman.com/
No, you are not the only one! I am using Safari and cannot get brotherhood 2.0 either!
Me too! I'm on Firefox and I can't get to brotherhood2.com at all. :(
Yep, brotherhood2.com is down, has been since last night. :-(
No, I don't think the site is down, I think the new server just isn't compatible with some browsers... i have no trouble getting there on Explorer... It's only the Mac browsers that are giving me trouble...
First Anonymous
I just finnished Looking For Alaska and it's awsum! Its my favoraite book! I don't agree with the review either. i donk recon it was moral or amoral, it was truthfull. it portayd its characters as people who are not good or bad or any of that crap. also, it didn't feel preachy to me at all. the acciside or whatever seemed more like an event/turning point of novel than a message about the effects of drink driving. it was excelent. i mean the novel, not what happend to Alaska. Sorry if this sounds like im trying to evalute/analise the book, i'm totaly not. i don't know much about writing apart from what i've read. ha. ok. cheers.
I don't know one way or the other, but wanted to say congrats from a fellow Kenyon alum! I was on the Columbus Metro Library web page, where your novel was featured, and thought, "That John Green? No, it couldn't be..."
I thought the point of the book wasn't that Drinking and Driving are BAD, but that she was feeling self-destructive and wasn't thinking clearly and the ambiguity of her intentions/the questions she left behind were the point. How her death affected her friends was the point. Their friend group dynamic shifting was the point. We all know drinking and driving is dangerous. John Green wouldn't write a whole book on just that. Right, John Green?
I read Looking for Alaska yesterday.
There were moral messages in the novel, but it's told from the viewpoint of an above-average intelligent kid with a romantic streak. At the end of the novel, he is still in high school and still has a romantic streak. Pudge knows that smoking cigarettes is unhealthy and even has a teacher with one lung, but he's at the stage where he can't really imagine himself getting cancer from a lifetime addiction to cigarettes. It's a realistic portrayal of a young adult.
The Colonel, who is the genius and the realist of the group of friends, sums up Alaska's behavior succinctly several times, but it's not something that a romantic Pudge wants to hear. Remember Pudge didn't think living at the poverty level was so bad. He later visits the Colonel's trailer/tent during Thanksgiving and sees Vine Station during Alaska's funeral. Only then does he even begin to imagine what it's really like for the Colonel and Alaska to be in a boarding school.
Perhaps, after Pudge graduates from college, holds a job, pays a mortgage, and goes through a divorce, then he will be able to moralize like a forty year old, but that would have turned this novel into a totally different book.
Both Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines were some of the best books I have ever read. My mom is the director of a large group of libraries and there are always groups trying to get books removed from the collection. One that is currently on debate is Looking for Alaska. As soon as I heard this I made sure to tell her how wonderful the book was and how it would be a crime to everyone to remove it from the collection. I don't think there is anything wrong with the book and I can't wait for your next one.
I just read "Looking for Alaska" the other day. It was good, but far more ... crude than I expected it to be. If the debate is, em, was about the glamourising of drink/driving then that's stupid. However, I can see why some people don't like it. In fact, my mum banned everyone else in the house from reading it and gave my dad a lot of trouble for buying it. (My dad's comment was "it can't be, he seems such a nice man on his videos!" High praise indeed. :D)
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