Looking for Alaska is filled with literary references to authors such as James Joyce, William Faulker, W.H. Auden, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Frost, Henrik Ibsen, Ernest Hemingway, and Chinua Achebe. Green's characters Alaska, Pudge and the Colonel are fairly standard teenagers who laugh, joke, see social relationships as their highest priority, experiment with sex and alcohol, and look for ways to bend school rules. They also delve into rich literary discourse with one another as they struggle to find deeper meaning in life. I see the marriage of these two realities as a fundamentally accurate depiction of what adolescent life is like for many people and as a welcome pathway into a contextualized study of essential literature.
After reading Looking for Alaska as a class, I might require students to choose an additional book to read from a list of titles mentioned by Green's characters. Students with matching choices would read their selected novel in literature circles. I would provide scaffolding and background information for more difficult texts, and I would monitor discussion. For each of the novels, students would discuss key themes and identify how those themes relate to LFA. As a final assignment, students could work independently to produce a series of journal entries in response to the novel, but they would write these journals in the voice of one of Green's characters. For example, how would the Colonel read A Farewell to Arms? How would he react to various events in the story? How might Alaska respond to A Doll's House? Would anything offend her? In this way, students will learn perspective-taking skills, interpretation of literature, and they will enhance their ability to compare multiple texts. What's more, I suspect the connection between a contemporary text and more classic ones will increase the likelihood that students will remember and appreciate literature even if it is far removed from their personal experience.
(Image: from York University, Canada)
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