Looking for Alaska

by John Green

Why does the text switch from past to present tense around Alaska’s death? Have you shifted tense in other books? I’m quite fond of tense changes. I used them in Paper Towns. I ALMOST used them in The Fault in Our Stars, but Julie (rightly) talked me out of it. (Originally, TFIOS moved between past and present tense almost every paragraph, which was a bit much.) So when I am telling a story, I switch a lot between past and present tense. I might be like, “So I was driving down the street and then BOOM a deer jumps out of the woods and almost hits my car, and I almost peed my pants.” That’s a grammatically disastrous sentence, but the reason I switch tenses there is because when describing the moment of crisis—the deer jumping out into the street—I feel as if it is still happening, and I want to express to you that it was so intense that on some level the experience is not over. We like to be very rigid in the way we imagine tense—some things are happening, other things have happened, etc. But one of the reasons we’ve created SO MANY tenses in English is that the way we actually experience time is quite complicated. When Pudge is talking about Alaska’s death, he is telling you a story that for him is still happening, a story that he hasn’t processed and put behind him. For me at least, that’s how trauma works. As Faulkner famously put it, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

I really liked this passage/ Q&A.