When Alaska dies in the middle of the novel, some interesting word choice is used to convey the state of the boarding school in its post-Alaska time. Instead of simply describing the students as falling apart, or some variation of that, John Green specifically says that the school is "disintegrating." This suggests that at one point, the school had been integrated, given that each student knew his or her place in the social hierarchy and each teenager knew where he or she belonged. Even Pudge, the new kid who was thrust unceremoniously into an undesirable situation at the beginning of the school year, found his position in Culver Creek Boarding School. Maybe there wasn't love and harmony amongst all the students, but there was certainly unity, balance, and integration. It was also a compact environment; before Alaska's death, the plot of the novel never digressed from the Culver Creek setting and the narrator never ventured out of the school grounds. Before Alaska's death, the world was quite small. But, when Alaska's light went out, it was almost as if a line of dominoes had fallen. Alaska breaks the integration with her death; she doesn't even quite die among the Culver Creek students, but rather she died far outside of the campus in the unfeeling outside world. And thus, what followed was full on disintegration.
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