Paper Towns Essay

El año pasado, para Inglés, nos pusieron a leer un libro y escribir acerca del mayor valor o antivalor del mismo. Después de negociar, me desvié un poco y escribí acerca del tema que consideré más importante, el juego entre lo heróico y lo humano.

Summary.

Title. Paper Towns

Author. John Green

Genre. Young adult novel

Date of publication. October 16, 2008

Publisher. Dutton books

Narrator. Quentin (‘Q’) Jacobsen

Point of view. Quentin’s point of view, narrated in past tense, switching to present tense

Setting in time. Senior year, final exams, graduation week

Places. Jefferson Park, Agloe, New York, South Carolina; various locations along the Orlando city.

Main characters and their name’s symbolism.

1. Quentin Jacobsen. An average high school senior who is getting ready to graduate, but his last days in high school suddenly change when his friend Margo disappears. After Margo runs away, Quentin worries about her and starts going after her clues until he finds her. He is called ‘Q’ by his friends, which contrasts fantastically with Margo’s massive polysyllabic name.
2. Margo Roth Spiegelman. Quentin’s childhood friend who later disappears bringing trouble for Quentin and his friends. After her run away, a detective explains Margo’s odd mentality regarding clues that she left behind before a major run away and a few of her odd habits. She is also physically beautiful with slim body and attractive eyes. However, her mind is something completely contradictory to what she looks like. As the author says, her name has ‘go’ in it. Spiegelman means “mirror maker” in German, allusive to the fact that Margo actually reflects the other characters in the novel, and Roth once meant ‘red’ in German, letting us think the author wanted her to have a color name, since he has one. Colors are recurrent along the novel, as black (black Santas) is how human endow things with meaning and white (the cow in the road, the walls of the school) are things totally apathetic to us.
3. Radar. One of the best buddies of Quentin since childhood, who is very talented with technology. He is obsessed with a page called Omnictionary -say, a kind of Wikipedia. His nickname highlights the fact that, among all his friends, he’s the one who knows better where everyone is, and feels.
4. Ben Starling. Quentin’s best friend since childhood, who is first chair clarinet player. He is easygoing, funny and likes to think simple. The author says there’s not really a meaning for this name, more than the fact that he liked how it sounded. However, the character itself is the one who reflects best the author when he was young.
5. Lacey Pemberton. Margo’s friend who later joins Quentin and his friends on a journey to find Margo. She is also very pretty with skinny body. Many adore Lacey for her beauty and she is the type of person who makes others care about how they look like. As she looks, from outside, very superficial, she only wants to find Margo. Again, her name has not really a meaning.

Obsession and insanity / Heroic and human.

The book starts by describing that Quentin lives at a subdivision of Orlando, Florida called Jefferson Park. He lives next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman, who he, as a kid, is deeply in love with. They became neighbors since they were two years old. When they were nine, they were hanging out in the park, and Margo pointed out to something near the oak tree. It was a dead body, encircled by blood. Quentin took two small steps backward because he was afraid that the dead man might wake up and attack him. However, on the other hand, Margo took two small steps forward, observing the dead body. Quentin urged Margo to step back and go home to tell their parents. After they came back to each their houses, Quentin’s parents called 911. Because Quentin’s parents were both therapists, they soothed Quentin to make him feel better, telling him that death is a stage of life, but not one he should be concerned about at the age of 9. That night, Margo Roth Spiegelman was standing outside Quentin’s window when Quentin was just about to sleep. Margo told Quentin that she did an investigation about the dead man. His name was Robert Joyner, who was thirty-six years old and a lawyer. She told Quentin that he killed himself with a gun because he was getting a divorce and was sad about it. But Margo and Quentin thought it was something more than just a divorce because “lots of people get divorces and don’t kill themselves.” (Green, 2008) Margo then told Quentin that the reason Robert killed himself was because “Maybe all the strings inside him broke.” (Green, 2008)

The phrase ‘Paper Towns’, although repeated a lot, giving the book its title, means a lot more. As it can mean a failed urbanist project, it describes the ‘paperness’ of a place, with “all those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer from some um who bought for them at the paper convenience store.” (Green, 2008) It brings out the fakeness of the world that we live in, as much as how Margo hates living in it. Q tells himself that’s the reason she left -and maybe not only “left” but that’s the reason she could have killed herself for. Despite the fact that Margo hates the “paper towns”, she is eventually found in a literal paper town; a copyright trap used by cartographers to discover plagiarism by other map makers. There, she reveals that the only reason she hates “paper people” is because she is one; fake and flimsy, and finally not really what everyone thought of her.

The book Moby Dick finally brings up one the main themes of the novel: the discussion between heroism and obsession, and how it is either insane or human. It is mentioned quiet a lot along the book, especially when Q’s teacher talks in class about it. It mirrors the heroic/obsessive hunt for Margo. The teacher says that Ahab is a fool for being obsessed, as Q seems really obsessed with finding Margo. His friends tell him to stop worrying for her; that he should enjoy this high school life a bit more. However, Q, in all his foolishness decides to do anything to find Margo, just like Captain Ahab did to search for the white whale.

And what’s more human than hope? The novel also mirrors Moby Dick in this aspect: it symbolizes the hopelessness of Q’s search. “You could also argue that there is something tragically heroic about fighting this battle he is doomed to lose” (Green, 2008), says the teacher. In the end, Q understands that his search for Margo would not make them be together after all, which emphasizes the overall hopelessness of his obsession, such as Captain’s Ahab’s hopeless attempt to kill the white whale.

Quentin, as stated before, is searching for Margo tirelessly and alone, even after people have told him to give up. It is on the borderline of obsession, where he skips prom, graduation and tries hard finding a clue that may lead him to where she might be. Yes, he can be easily compared to Captain Ahab, an obsessed man. Being so foolish he becomes a hero instantly relates back to Q. Is it simply an obsession or a tragical heroic act? On one side, Q’s obsession is fooolish because, 1. Margo were only playdates, neighbors since kids; not really friends since then, and 2. Q has no real proof that Margo wants him to find her. On the other hand, Q’s act of selflessness, in attempts to find Margo and help her is somehow heroic.

Quentin’s teacher later asks “Is Ahab’s hope a kind of insanity, or is it the very definition of humanness?” (Green, 2008). It is hard to say, in this way, if Q is just insane or too much like a human. One could take the fact, in the part where he doesn’t go to prom, that he really believes she’s dead; he needs to find her body, since the clues were meant for him. Or consider where he skips graduation to go to New York, feeding the wrong notion of knight-in-shining-armor-saving-damsel-in-distress, wich in Q’s defense of humanity is so widely and deeply celebrated in our culture, that it would take superhuman effort to escape it. But, anyway, what he’s willing to do is borderline insane; he does everything he does ignoring he can get in trouble with his parents, he can be fined for driving too fast, he won’t be able to pay everything spent in the trip to find her, he can get both his friends and himself killed in a car accident, which in the end almost occurs: he blames Margo, when he should actually blame himself. He does all of this, again, without a real proof she wants him to find her, that she will come back to Orlando with him or even that she loves him as much as he loves her.

Q’s search is actually lonely. He’s alone in searching for Margo and looking for clues, because people like the detective simply say “Let me give you some advice: let her come home. I mean, at some point, you gotta stop looking at the sky, or one of these days you'll look back down and see that you floated away, too" (Green, 2008) (like if all people were balloons and some of them had more helium than others, which defines if they are bound to a place or belong to the sky.) He’s left alone to connect Margo’s clues, driving around, looking for places Margo might be, hoping the next one is where she’s hiding. Although his two best friends are with him, they do not care as much as he does in searching for Margo. In the end of the story, it is implied that  his friends are only coming to New York for the excitement and the adventure of the search, not for the sake of finding Margo. Q even notices that, “Ben only wanted to talk about Margo when it involved an adventure that appealed to him, that he thought there was something wrong with me for focusing on her over my friends, even though she was missing and they weren’t” (Green, 2008). This truly exemplifies the loneliness of Q’s search, showing that no one else cared for Margo as much as he did, they all joined because it was a fun adventure, and even in the end, no one else did.

There are a lot of metaphors through the novel, like the strings and what Walt Whitman writes (that Q spends a lot of time reading) about how we are all leaves of grass and our roots are connected, but the novel tells us more important things, deep inside, than this symbolisms. It teaches us that the perception we have of other people is, at the end of the day, a mere reflection of ourselves. That every person in this world is a compilation of perceptions of other people, and the true essence of a being can’t be understood by no one but the being itself. As Walt Whitman puts it: you have to become the wounded man in order to understand its pain. (Whitman, 1973)

Green couldn’t have expressed this more brilliantly; in the end Margo isn’t the loving, fun, unafraid-of-life girl people around her imagine her to be. She’s just a normal girl, wanting attention from her parents, being afraid of the future, and who is... insecure after all.

The moral of the situation is showing us that we are all humans; and the point is changing the way we think about other human beings. Because you can only evaluate other people using your standards: your brain, your eyes, your experiences, your maturity: viewing people as your mother, your brother, your friend, and never fully understand their world. In that way it’s pretty easy to dehumanize or superhumanize others. And, finally, the solution to not understanding people it’s not becoming them: it’s having empathy towards them. It might be an incomplete hard-to-use tool, but it’s the best we have.

Bibliography.

1. Green, John. Paper Towns. Dutton Books, 2008.
2. "Paper Towns - John Green." 2010. 22 Sep. 2012 <http://johngreenbooks.com/paper-towns/>
3. "Questions about Paper Towns." 2010. 22 Sep. 2012 <http://johngreenbooks.com/pt-questions/>
4. Whitman, Walt, and Orson Welles. Song of myself. Masterbooks, 1973.