Alaska is a key figure and the driving force in this book. She is symbolic of all that youth has to offer the good the bad and the ugly. Alaska is the girl with the edge and yet she is smart. She knows when to talk and when to keep it to herself. She is like Jane in this light. She intentionally withholds information to manipulate the characters she is with while simultaneously drawing them in making them almost addicted. Alaska achieves the sort of Mona Lisa look that intoxicates others and draws them in. She does this with her small grin of I know something you don't. Alaska with all her smarts has all the bad judgement factors that go along with being a teenager especially a teenager that is often left unsupervised and up to no good. In her we see the lightness of a happy spirit and the darkness of a spirit fatigued by a past experience. For Alaska her experience was her mothers death, Alaska was there watched her die and did nothing didn't call 911 rather just went and sat in silence with her mother until her father got home. Her father came home to a dead wife and a daughter who didn't even realize what had happened. This experience continued to eat away at Alaska till she could not take it any longer or maybe it truly was an accident no one will truly know. The experience of her mothers death could have propelled her into a successful career, but rather it continued to eat at her and she began to drink and smoke. Then the night she dies she forgets the anniversary of her mothers death its all over for her. Alaska chose the name means "that which the sea breaks against," and in her life and death Alaska truly does have the seas part against her.