Analysis of John Green’s Book, Paper Towns

Paper Towns

Quentin “Q” Jacobsen is a high school senior only weeks away from his graduation. Ever since he as a kid, he has had a massive crush on his beautiful, adventurous next door neighbor Margo Roth Spiegelman. One night, Margo comes to his window, and asks for his help with a few revenge pranks. After some convincing, he agrees to go with her. At the end of the night, she tells him that she will miss hanging out with him. The next day, Margo is nowhere to be found. After she’s been missing for several days, Q discovers some clues left behind by Margo that could lead to her whereabouts. With the help of his best friends Ben and Radar, along Margo’s friend Lacey, Q spends the majority of his time leading up to graduation in search of Margo.

“The fundamental mistake I had always made—that she had, in fairness, always led me to make—was this: Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.”

John Green’s purpose for writing Paper towns was to show that people often mis-imagine, and as a result dehumanize those that they have romantic feelings for, or those they admire, and that these fantasies are incorrect. People are people. They have dimensions, and people have the tendency to make others fit this image that they have for them in their heads. But people are realer than that, and though it’s too easy to think of someone as something ‘more’ or ‘better’, as a result of the fact that we can never be someone else, feel what someone else is feeling, or see what someone else sees. However, they aren’t anything more, and they are no less human than you. They aren’t made of paper, they can’t be folded into shapes and colored in just the way you want them to be. “What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person” Green says in the novel, and he is correct.

I wholeheartedly recommend the book Paper Towns. It is incredibly well written and enjoyable, and the characters are remarkably loveable and real. The story is truly moving and the messages are so powerful. It’s funny, mysterious, and deep, and as a result, it appeals to several different literary preferences that you may have all at once. The story is briskly paced and loaded with casually brilliant observations that will really make you think.