Last Words Symbol in Looking for Alaska | LitCharts

For much of

Looking for Alaska

,

Miles

thinks of

last words

as a way to encapsulate the way a great person lived, and he memorizes many famous people’s last words. Like the Buddhist

koans

Miles learns about in his World Religions class, these last words seem like guides on how to live life. Miles maintains his love of last words after

Alaska

’s death, but he ultimately has to accept that he will never know hers. What he has, instead, are Alaska’s

lasting

words: “To be continued?” Miles points out the difficulty of preserving people’s last words when their death does not seem imminent, and he realizes that last words are not necessarily people’s most important words. By the end of the book, last words come to symbolize the many different ways one could choose to live, but they do not provide any definitive answers. By letting go of Alaska’s last words, Miles learns to live with ambiguity and ultimately comes to enjoy the fact that he does not know what’s coming in his own “Great Perhaps.”