Looking for Alaska

A week after discovering the doodle, Miles has become resigned to its insignificance. The students have just returned from a town meeting, in which it was announced that a playground will be built in memory of Alaska. Her friends, however, want to do something funnier—something that she would have loved. Accordingly, the Colonel refers to a prank that Alaska had been planning entitled ‘Subverting the Patriarchal Paradigm,’ and they decide to carry it out in her honor. The Colonel says that they owe her this, though Miles still believes that she owes them an explanation and hopes that she may give them a clue somehow.

Two weeks later, the Colonel has formulated the plan and is outlining it to Miles, Takumi, and Lara. The first step is to find a stripper, and the second step is for Miles “to work some magic with his dad” (201).

Every spring, Culver Creek has a Speaker Day, in which members of the junior and senior classes choose two speakers to address the school. This event has a reputation for being boring, but the Colonel and his friends intend to spice things up. The plan hinges on convincing the Eagle to allow “Dr. William Morse”—a “scholar specializing in deviant sexuality in adolescents” and “a friend of Miles’s father”—to act as the junior class’s speaker.