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54. One Hundred Two Days After
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Looking for Alaska, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
How to Live and Die
Mystery and the Unknown
Loyalty and Forgiveness
Memory and Memorial
Identity
Mischief
Summary
Analysis
A week and a half later, Takumi suggests that the date January 10 might be significant. To Miles, it’s the day Alaska died, but Takumi reminds him that Alaska’s best day of her life—the day at the zoo with her mom—was January 9, which means that January 10 was also the day Alaska’s mother died. They tell this to the Colonel. The three of them decide that doodling daisies must have reminded Alaska that she forgot the anniversary of her mother’s death. She left campus to take Jake’s white flowers to her mother’s grave. Maybe she thought she could make it past the police car or, as Takumi suggests, maybe she was so upset for forgetting to call 911 and then forgetting the anniversary of her mother’s death that she decided to kill herself.
While the white flowers have a fairly clear symbolic value for Alaska, she unfortunately does not recognize their full meaning. To Alaska, these flowers were symbolic of her mother’s death, but more generally, white daisies and tulips are symbolic of innocence and worthiness, respectively. At the moment when she feels the most guilty, Alaska is unknowingly driving to put flowers that symbolize forgiveness on her mother’s grave. This action—the fact that Alaska cares so deeply about her mother that she is distraught about forgetting the anniversary of her death—shows what a worthy person Alaska is deep down.
Themes
