Paper Towns

Walt Whitman’s poem, “Song of Myself”, is a symbol that appears throughout the novel. Quentin first discovers the poem during his investigation of Margo’s disappearance. She leaves the poem as a clue for him, and he hopes that, by reading and understanding the poem, he will better understand Margo and be able to her. The poem is difficult for Quentin to understand at first, but he recognizes the elements of compassion and connectedness that run through Whitman’s poem. At first, the poem seems to be a symbol of death, as a few lines that Margo has highlighted suggest to Quentin that Margo has killed herself. Through further reading, and after speaking with his English teacher, Quentin realizes that the poem is more than the sum of its parts and that a comprehensive reading offers a better understanding of Whitman’s views on human connection. In this way, Quentin can finally understand Whitman’s suggestion that human beings are connected like blades of grass, by a common root system. This system should allow for empathy, but as Quentin learns from his search for Margo, it is not so easy to “become” another person. In the end, Quentin finds Whitman’s view too optimistic. He develops his own concept of human connectedness, replacing the leaves of grass with the image of human beings as cracked vessels.

Like Moby Dick and “Song of Myself,” Margo’s notebook works as a piece of narrative fiction within the larger work. Margo’s notebook contains all of her planning and schemes and she always carries it with her. The notebook is so important to Margo that Lacey recalls she once picked out a new purse based on whether or not the notebook could fit inside. Quentin comes to realize that the all of the clues and dead ends would be made clear to him if he could just get his hands on the notebook. When he finds Margo at the end of the novel, she explains that she has had the notebook since she was in grade school, and that she had written a story about her and Quentin in it. She later began planning out her adventures in the notebook, all of it layered over the original story. As a symbol, the notebook represents Margo’s authentic self, which might seem ironic at first, in that the notebook is filled with fiction. However, the Margo that writes in the notebook is the version of Margo that no one else knows, not her parents or her friends—not even Quentin. It is an authentic symbol of Margo, the secret person that she has hidden for so long from the world. By burying the notebook at the end of the novel, Margo effectively buries her old self, the one caught up with Robert Joyner and the paper town of Orlando. Margo is now able to live a new life in a new town, and to be more than a “paper girl.”

Music and literature have operated as mediums of connection since time immemorial. They play an important role in the novel as well. Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is a clue left by Margo that Quentin spends most of the novel trying to unravel. He learns more about Margo through reading this poem. Likewise, Moby Dick is assigned to Quentin’s class, and he must decide whether Ahab is a hero or villain, forcing him to assess another’s actions and whether or not they are justified. His assessment of Ahab’s quest offers a reflection on his own search for Margo.

While searching for Margo, Quentin and his friends also find that she has a large record collection. By listening to songs by Woody Guthrie, Quentin attempts to connect in some way to Margo. They also listen to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme, which is an achingly beautiful album about love and connections. Radar, who plays the sax himself, admires Margo for her taste in music, thereby drawing a connection between the two seemingly different individuals. At the end of the novel, Margo reads from Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, where she identifies with the desire for suicide, but also the realization that what the victim wants to excise is not the weak flesh, but further down, deeper in. All of these pieces of music and literature paint a picture of human beings desperate to connect, and offer the means to do so.