Perception Vs. Reality By John Green

How has technology affected mankind over time? How has it affected the youth of our country? How has it affected the adults? We rely on the internet for almost everything, do we still have the power to detach ourselves from it? The article, “The Virtues of Reality” written by Ross Douthat caught my attention with a thesis that is quite realistic. Douthat theorizes that the main cause of both the youth becoming safer over time along with the adults growing more immature is the virtual reality that the internet provides us with. Douthat then leaves the readers with a thought to ponder about. He questions if we as human beings have become so reliant on technology, that we can’t take a step back. What I wish to know is why should we need to take a step back when the world that we live in has infused technology along with the internet into everything that we do in life?

Paper Towns, by John Green, is about a boy named Quentin (Q to his friends) who has spent most of his lifetime loving his childhood friend, Margo Roth Spiegelman. One night, Margo takes Q with her on an adventure,she spends the night getting her revenge on her so called “friends”. The next day, Margo is nowhere to be seen and no one seems worried but Q. Q discovers that Margo left behind clues, and he is determined to discover the mystery behind Margo, but the closer Q gets to her the more he discovers that she isn’t who he thought she was. One of the reasons why Q seemed to like Margo so much is because she was different, she was actually very wise.

Paper towns, written by John Green, is a about a young and timid teenager named Quentin. However, he is in for the night of his life when Margo Roth Spiegelman, the most popular girl at school, selects him to help her with risky pranks on the friends that betrayed her. However, Margo disappears the following day, which brings Quentin to develop an obsession of finding her. Quinten, unable to merely forget about Margo, embarks on a journey together with his friends to find the girl who stole his heart. The plot functions along with the main conflict, which is Quinten against the society. The first example of this conflict is demonstrated early in the novel. After Quinten helps Margo play the pranks on her ex-friends, Margo disappears the following

Paper Towns by John Green is the story of Quentin and his friends, Ben, Radar, and Lacey as they travel go on a journey to find Margo who may not want them to find her. The theme of this book is a reunion. Meaning that the main character, Quentin, goes on a journey to reunite with Margo, who he has known his entire life. To accomplish this, he first has to figure out where she went and then he has to come up with a strategy to reunite with her.

As the protagonist of the film, Margo Channing’s destructiveness is primarily self-inflicted. She feels vulnerable about her age and is certain that she is an expendable actress in the theatre. Margo takes her frustrations about her age out on Bill, when she misses the reading with Miss Caswell and slyly asks Bill if he is leaving her to go see Eve. In this way Margo is her own harshest critic, and this self-damaging attitude leaves her vulnerable at times in the film. Margo’s wardrobe throughout the film (namely at the Sarah Siddons award and at Bill’s birthday party) is more risqué than Karen’s, perhaps to show her want to hold on to younger fashion trends. This destructive nature is not caused by Bill, who loves Margo unconditionally, but

Although someone may know another person very well, they most likely don’t know who they really are on the inside. In John Green’s book, Paper Towns, the theme is shown through many different characters, but Margo mostly shows it. Some points describing the theme are that Quentin and his friends realize what kind of person Margo is, and how many different ways there could be of viewing someone, and Quentin coming up to a realization of the value of accepting other's flaws. In Green's book, all the characters eventually accept other's values.

In page 339 of the novel she says; “I was the flimsy-foldable person, not everyone else. …People love the idea of a paper girl. They always have. And the worse thing is that I loved it, too. I cultivated it, you know? Because it's kind of great, being an idea that everybody likes. But I could never be the idea to myself, not all the way. …I thought maybe the paper cut-out of a girl could start becoming real here also.” At the beginning of this novel she runs away to the ‘paper town’ of Agloe, New York; a town that only exists on maps like she let herself become a girl who only exists in the minds of others. As she states in the quote she felt she could become real there. If the place that only exists on paper can become real then so can the girl. Throughout the novel the characters come to realizations about how their perspectives had begun to alter the truth of Margo. One way this was realized as a general thought is in the excerpt where Q (Quentin) and his friends create a game, “That Guy Is a Gigolo”; in this game you observe someone around you and dictate what their life is like. They came to the conclusion through this game, that this process showed more about themselves rather than the people they were creating a life for, because their process was to project their ideas and world-views onto the person: “The thing about That Guy is a Gigolo,” (Radar one of Q’s

Margo Roth Spiegelman is not the normal antagonist in a teen drama. Although Margo isn't exactly the “villain” in this novel, she is still the antagonist. She is gorgeous and has a popular and jock boyfriend, Jase. She wants others to view her personality as the typical popular girl. She doesn’t keep her adventurous attributes hidden from her friends, even though she is very secretive. She doesn’t fully show others her actual personality, Margo doesn’t want anyone to know that she's quite a mysterious person and not the outgoing person they all think of her as. Margo lives life to the fullest; she doesn’t like to stress over her future, as there is “no time[...]”(33) for her. Margo wants to be different from everyone else, she does many things that go against the norms of today’s society, she strongly believes in “random capitalization[...]”(32).

He learns there is more to people, especially Margo, than what meets the eye. Quentin comprehends that everyone changes and grows, and it is quite trivial to cling to a perceived notion of Margo he had fabricated years earlier when they were children. This mere image Quentin had constructed portrayed Margo as flawless, unblemished, prize-like object to be sought after. After Quentin discovers Margo he learns that she wasn’t as concerned about his well being as he was with hers. "Margo was not a miracle. She was not an adventure. She was not a fine and precious thing. She was a girl.” (199) Quentin started to see Margo for what she was, not the one- dimensional girl he had formulated in his imagination when he was younger. “And all at once I knew how Margo Roth Spiegelman felt when she wasn’t being Margo Roth Spiegelman: she felt empty. She felt the unsaleable wall surrounding her.”

Paper Towns is about a boy name Quentin Jacobsen and a girl named Margo Roth Spiegelman. They lived right across from each other. When Quentin and Margo were young they were pretty close, but when they got older they drifted apart. They both had different friend groups and different interests when they got to high school. Then at midnight one night Margo Came to Quentin’s window, and took him on a little adventure.

While Quentin from Paper Towns finds his true feelings about Margo setting all of his determination for finding the true Margo, Hannah Gill from “The Ghost Bird” finds the ivory-billed woodpeckers after bonding with her family on the journey of finding this rare bird. In Paper Towns, Quentin finds Margo and finally sees , “Through the veil” and sees Margo as she truly is. As they are kissing, Quentin notes , “She is close enough to me that I can see her, because even now there is the outward sign of invisible light, even in the night in this parking lot on the outskirts of Algoe. After we kiss, our foreheads touch as we stare at each other. Yes, I can see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness.”(Green 3950) Throughout the novel, the idea of seeing different aspects of Margo in the story as characters such as Lacey, Quentin, Ben and Michael each see her differently. The text suggest that he has now been offered the unique experience of seeing Margo as her true self and not as he had believed she was a benevolent and adventurous miracle. This part of the story is very conceptualized toward the fact that he his time spent alone with Margo brings him closer to her. He can now see her consciousness through the skin and through all of the paper beauty. After Hannah Gill had come close to her family when looking for the ivory-billed woodpecker, she gets a very exciting surprise in store for her , she looks and sees, “ Not 10 feet away were two of the most beautiful birds she had ever seen. One of them was hammering its ivory-colored bill on the floor and chasing the beetles that emerged from the rotting boards. The other bird was sitting on a nest; beneath her were three downy heads.” We can infer from this example in the text that Hannah had finally seen the

Life is very complex and often hard to define. However, this challenge does not stop people from trying to sum up the meaning of life in one word. In Paper Towns by John Green, the three metaphors the strings, the grass, and the vessel are used throughout the book to chronicle the protagonist’s, Quentin, experiences. The novel revolves around Quentin Jacobsen, a high school senior. When his former best friend and long time crush, Margo Roth Spiegelman, comes back into his life and then suddenly disappears, Q attempts to piece together the clues he believes Margo left behind for him. Each of these three metaphors represent what Q is feeling and allow him to view life from different perspectives. As

“It’s a paper town. I mean look at it Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs, those streets that turn in on themselves, all the houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm” (Green 57). This quote is from The #1 New York Times Bestseller, Paper Towns, written by John Green. In part one of this book, Quentin Jacobsen, the main character, lives in a subdivision in Florida named Jefferson Park. Quentin’s miracle in life was his neighbor, Margo Roth Spiegelman. As time went passing by, their relationship slowly disintegrated during high school. One night, Margo decides to show up at Q’s window and goes on a crazy adventure in the middle of the night. After the night was over, she was not seen ever since that morning of school. In this journal, I

Just like how we can hit rough patches in life and it forms cracks in us, and then others around us can see through our cracks and see the truth inside us. Quentin saw Margo as this amazing person who was “perfect”. However, she expressed that image when she was a “watertight vessel”. But then some of her friends turned against her and her boyfriend cheated on her, so she started to crack. And that is only when Quentin realised the real Margo.

The main character of Paper towns is Quentin Jacobsen. He is 18 years old, lives in Orlando, Florida, and is a senior about to graduate high school. He is a regular person in the beginning of the book with fears and isn't special in any way and he lives a very normal life, except for that he is madly obsessed about his lifetime neighbor, his childhood friend, and his lifelong crush, Margo Roth Spiegelman. Margo unlike Quentin, lives a very not normal life and her personality is the complete opposite of Quentin’s. Margo is brave, curious, confident, and is downright awesome. These attributes make Quentin feel like Margo is amazing and make him want to be with her. Nine years ago at the age of nine, Quentin and Margo find a dead body in Jefferson park, Quentin is scared of it and backs away while Margo on the other hand is curious and approaches it. Margo says that she can see that all the strings inside of the dead guy are broken. Then Quentin grabs her and they run home away from it. This shows that Quentin is a person that is easily scared and afraid of things, but he also really cares about the people he love. Then nine years later, Quentin Jacobsen is an average, unpopular student that is still afraid of things, while Margo Roth Spiegelman is one of the most popular girls in the whole school and is still courageous and brave. Quentin and Margo now hardly even talk to each other now until, One night, Margo goes to Quentin’s room and asks him if he wants to