(Spoiler Alert)

I found the long question quoted below among the comments on my last post. I can't be sure it was written by a teenager (unless, Dido, you identify yourself). But I suspect it was.

(A side note addressed to adults: I would argue that when we think about teens as readers, we need to stop thinking about the teens we know. Like, around us, teens can be awkward and intellectually unimpressive. But they often aren't showing us their best selves, precisely because they feel the intellectual distance between us and them. I'd argue that the ONLY way to bridge that distance is to deny its existence. I'm not arguing that all teenagers are like Dido. I'm just arguing that most can be like him/her. I'd also argue, slightly off-topic, that of course you don't need to be able to connect Paper Towns--or any book--to Moby Dick or Orpheus or Gatsby or whatever in order for a book to be intellectually rewarding. That these connections exist does not make a novel inaccessible, except in the case of outlandishly referential work like, say, Finnegan's Wake. But okay, let's listen to Dido and be reminded that people like him/her exist:)

"Somewhere down along the very long list of things I love about the book is the fact that Q reads Ovid. I take Latin, and though I feel guilty about not knowing a modern language yet I love the language and literature and the whole idea of knowledge for its own sake (because everyone thinks that reading ancient poetry is impractical). Did you take Latin? Anyway, this seems very irrelevant but it's partly why I'm asking this question.

"I was so blown away by Paper Towns I reread it right away. And the second time, I was really struck by the scene where Margo gets bit by the snake. It reminded me of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, which I especially love Rilke's version of. I realized that the whole book could be loosely seen as within that framework. She is taken from him - not through fate but through her own will - just when they begin to redevelop some sort of a relationship. And she is, from his point of view, lost in the underworld; he actually thinks she is dead. She has gone to the world of the paper towns, and he is willing to follow her despite all the dangers and obstacles. The idea of comparing Q to Orpheus is laughable in light of his terrible tone-deafness, but he does seem to see Margo at first as the helpless, beautiful, one-dimensional Eurydice - a classic damsel-in-distress. But she is an actual person who makes her own decisions, and despite the fact that Q follows her into her new world he is unable to bring her back. Because, like Orpheus, he looks at her - because instead of focusing simply on his own world, the outside world he lives in, he looks at her. And he sees her. And Margo never needed saving, not even from the snake. But the ending had the same bittersweetness as the end of Orpheus; she might have come with him, or he might have stayed, but they must go in separate directions. Just as Orpheus gives up a woman he though he owned, Q gives up all the images he attached to Margo. And she is free. In a way the snake incident, which seems so random at the time, foreshadows all of this, shows that their relationship can't last. At least this way my thinking.

"So my question, more simply is: was the snake a deliberate allusion to the story of Orpheus and Eurydice?"

Yes. I mean, of course the moment with the snake is also trying to play with the oldest serpent, that one in Genesis. But yeah. Yeah. Nice reading, kid.