Paper Towns by John Green

Paper Towns by John Green

Introduction

This paper presents an analysis of relation displayed in the novel Paper town, written by John Green. The novel was published in the year 2008. The novel was awarded with the best children book award under New York Times bestseller list. John's open admiration of women friends found approval among her own circle of acquaintances, both male and female, the members of whom she assigned classical names. The novel revolves around the story of Quentin Jacobsen (a seventeen-year-old boy) and Margo (Quentin's childhood best friend). The story moves through a series of plot that emphasize on the relationship intensity between them and the effectiveness of their relationship as a friend (Green, 2010). This paper presents a critical analysis of the most important relationships presented in the book and its importance.

Discussion

Every story contains seismic shocks, identities are reinvented and relationships change over time, yet through these fragmented narratives John introduces "powerful legendary shapes behind ordinary life" that appear to overlap with the anecdotal present lives of his protagonists, just as they in turn experience moments of slipping sideways between different dimensions of reality (Green, 2010). These intimate dislocations point the way back to opening questions, which could now be reformulated as one question referring to determination of importance of friend's relation in one's life (Carman, 2011).

In the novel Paper Towns, there is a proliferation of characters through different stories as John looks into the complicated processes involved in growing up and growing older when identities appear to change at different times, in different places, in different relationships (Surhone & Tennoe, 2010). Place is still important even if many of these stories are more concerned with departures than with returns home, though the abstract and malleable concept of "friendship" would seem better to accommodate the multidimensionality of John's representations of identity in the novel (Carman, 2011).

Characteristically, John's discussion freely runs together the natural and the human realms, refusing to draw a firm line between the two. He claims to see signs of friendship everywhere: from the laws of gravity to the evolution of relationships, from theories of relations to the precepts of human morality (Green, 2010). Importantly, this "law of laws" is no more susceptible to human manipulation than it is owing to providential design. Friendship is written into the nature of things, a universal condition that cannot be rejected in one's relation. Since John thinks that this compensatory pattern informs human relation as much as it does the laws of friendship, the distinction between facts and values does not trouble his discussion (Green, 2010). How things are and how we ought to behave are not, in his view, conflicting considerations; what lurks within the soul as a sentiment, he tells us at one point, we recognize outside as a law.

The relationship between Margo and Quentin highlight the importance of the friendship in one's life. Friendship as an impassioned form contains various startling figures of speech and ideas to emphasize a classic form through ...