Paper Towns by John Green

Elizabeth Gaskell once said, “How easy it is to judge rightly after one sees what evil comes from judging wrongly!” “Paper Towns” by John Green is a story about failing to see the truth in an individual. Quentin Jacobsen, the main character, sees his neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman as beautiful and adventurous from afar, but when she enters his life, summoning him on a quest for revenge-he follows. After their night is complete and a new day begins, Quentin arrives at school to find the Margo is now gone, and a mystery. However, Quentin quickly discovers clues left behind for him, and the closer he comes to solving the mystery, the less he sees the Margo he imagined. The theme of the story is perception, and seeing people for who they really are. The theme is best expressed with Quentin Jacobsen’s obsession with Margo, but is also expressed in a comical way when Quentin and his friends look at various car drivers and make snap judgements about their lives. Finally, the perception Quentin has of one of his best friends, Ben, makes him come off as having a friendship by convenience and selfishness.

To begin, the theme of the story is best represented with Quentin’s obsession over Margo Roth Spiegelman. Quentin believes she is somewhat of a miracle in his life stating, “But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the houses in all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living next door to Margo Roth Spiegelman” (Green 3). Quentin placed his next door neighbor on a pedestal by only exploring her outside beauty instead of figuring out who she truly was. Quentin spent literally nine years of his life obsessing over a girl for her looks, and never found out what lied within. Meanwhile, this treatment is given ...

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...he book Quentin came to the realization that he forgot to think of Margo as a person. Rather, he believed her to be a perfect human with no flaws, and ultimately this proved to be false. Margo turned out to be a normal girl struggling to find her true identity in a harsh societal culture based on making snap judgements. Overall, the life lesson learned is that people are not paper, they have added dimensions to them that serve as never ending complexities that we can only partially discover. It was said in the story that, “Imagining isn’t perfect. You can’t get all the way inside someone else...But imagining being someone else or the world being something else is the only way in” (Green 299). Sometimes, you have to try to walk in someone else’s shoes to really take a closer look at who they are.

Works Cited

Green, John. Paper Towns. New York: Dutton, 2008. Print.