Alaska Young Copes with Grief in John Green's Looking for Alaska

This study attempts to analyze the main character, Alaska Young in John Green’s Looking for Alaska. It focuses on Alaska’s characterization and the way Alaska copes with her grief through her whole life. New criticism is applied as the supporting theory to find out the characterization of Alaska Young. The characterization then is used to support the main analysis of the research. Coping mechanism is applied as the main theory to find out the way Alaska copes with her grief. The results reveal that Alaska Young has some characteristics: smart, unpredictable, self-blame, hopeless, and impulsive. Alaska’s characterization shows that she has problem dealing with trauma when she was a child. The way Alaska copes with grief can be seen while she used some of strategies that included into emotion-focused coping that are self-control, accepting responsibility, distancing, and escape-avoidance. However, coping is not always effective, thus, some of the strategies that Alaska used has made her failing in facing her problem. It can be said that Alaska has unresolved grief.