Go Ask Alice

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Go Ask Alice

• Anonymous

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(No Transcript)
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Images from the early 70s
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More Images
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Drug Use Images
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Drug Use Images
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Drug Use Images
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Drug Use
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Characters

• Alice -  Alice is the anonymous protagonist (her
  name is an allusion to a Jefferson Airplane song)
  whose intermittent diary entries narrate Go Ask
  Alice. An intelligent, sensitive girl with a
  literary flair, she experiments with drugs and
  the counterculture to escape from her low
  self-esteem and consuming loneliness.

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Characters

• Parents  -  Alice's unnamed father (a professor)
  and mother (a homemaker) care deeply about their
  daughter but are unable to communicate with her
  openly. They lead a traditional
  upper-middle-class life.
• Joel -  Joel is a working-class freshman at
  Alice's father's university. His father died when
  he was young, his mother toils in a factory, and
  he works as a janitor to pay his tuition. He is
  gentle in his growing romantic relationship with
  Alice, spiritual in a non-religious way, and wise
  about many things, especially loss.

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Characters

• Grandparents  -  Alice's grandparents are beloved
  members of the family. Alice spends a summer with
  them, and they visit on holidays up until their
  deaths.
• Siblings  -  Alice's younger siblingsTim and
  Alexandriaare better adjusted than she is, which
  sometimes makes her jealous. Tim develops into a
  mature young man.

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Characters

• Chris -  Chris accompanies Alice on her journey
  to San Francisco, and the two girls go on and off
  drugs together.
• Roger -  Roger is a straight, square boy on whom
  Alice has an overwhelming crush. He plans to
  attend military school.
• Sheila -  Sheila is a sophisticated older woman,
  into drugs and kinky sex, who gets Chris a job in
  her hip San Francisco boutique.

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Characters

• Richie -  Richie is Alice's college boyfriend
  until she leaves home the first time. She sells
  drugs to help him someday attend medical school.
• Babbie -  Alice meets Babbie, a young former
  prostitute and drug addict, in the mental
  hospital
• Beth -  Beth is Alice's Jewish neighbor, a nice
  girl with whom Alice bonds at first but, after
  Alice's drug use, Alice finds she has changed.

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Characters

• Mr. Mellani -  An affable, fatherly custom
  jeweler who gives Alice a job. He has a large,
  robust Italian family
• Dr. Miller -  The psychiatrist at Alice's mental
  hospital. He is sympathetic to Alice's case.
• Doris -  A 14-year-old girl whom Alice meets in
  Oregon. She has been sexually abused by both her
  stepfather and foster family siblings.

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Characters

• Lane -  A violent drug user at school who tries
  to get Alice to get him drugs and later becomes
  her supplier.
• Jan -  An old drug-using friend of Alice's who
  threatens Alice when she won't return to her old
  habits and eventually gets Alice put in the
  mental hospital.
• Fawn -  A "straight" girl who befriends Alice at
  the end of the book and accepts her into her
  group of non-drug-using friends.

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Characters

• Greta -  An awkward girl Alice initially
  befriends when she moves into the new town.
• Ted -  Richie's college roommate who has a hidden
  homosexual relationship with him

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Themes

• Difficulty of Communication-Alice begins her
  diary because she has no one else to talk to, and
  she spends her energy searching not for drugs,
  but for someone who understands her. The drugs
  only create the temporary illusion that she is in
  touch with nature and people.
• Problems of Adolescent Identity-The deeper
  problem for Alice, though, is the adolescent
  cliché of not knowing who she is

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Motifs

• Counterculture and Drugs -The hippie
  counterculture of drugs, casual sex, and other
  anti-establishment mores readily seduces Alice,
  whose discontentment with her middle-class
  upbringing is strong in the first few sections of
  the diary and whenever she reverts to drugs
• Sexual Assault-Alice documents several cases of
  sexual assault, either on her or on others. She
  and Chris are molested by Sheila and her
  boyfriend Alice performs oral sex for drugs a
  boy from school threatens to rape her and both
  Doris and Babbie have long histories of abuse.

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Symbols

• Maggots and worms- We can interpret the maggots
  and worms as all the destructive impulses of
  society that Alice has internalized into low
  self-esteem society is "pushing" her inside the
  coffin, as it has pushed her into drugs, away
  from her family, and into a lonely corner at
  school.

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Key Facts

• Time and place written  late 1960s, The United
  States
• Narrator  Alice
• Climax  Alice is freed from the mental hospital
  and decides to commit her life to staying clean
  and helping others
•  Antagonist  Drugs society as a whole
• Setting (time)  Late 1960s
• Setting (place)  An unidentified college town
  San Francisco/Berkeley Oregon

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Key Facts Conti

• Point of view  Alice's first-person diary
  entries
• Tense  Immediate past tense

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Background Info.

• Go Ask Alice is a controversial 1971 book about
  the life of a troubled teenage girl that is
  considered a classic of American young adult
  literature. The book purports to be the actual
  diary of an anonymous teenage girl who died of a
  drug overdose in the late 1960s and is therefore
  presented as a testimony against drug use. Alice
  is not the protagonist's name the actual
  diarist's name is never given in the book. A
  woman named Alice is mentioned briefly in one
  entry during the diarist's stay in Denver she is
  a fellow addict the diarist meets on the street.
  Despite this, reviewers generally refer to the
  diarist as "Alice" for the sake of convenience.

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Where did the title come from?

• The title is from the lyrics to the Jefferson
  Airplane song "White Rabbit". Grace Slick wrote
  the song based on perceived drug references in
  the classic novel Alice In Wonderland. (On July
  14 page 36 of the 2006 edition, the writer says
  she "feels like Alice in Wonderland" and "maybe
  Lewis G. Caroll was on drugs too.")

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Plot

• When she begins keeping a journal the diarist,
  the daughter of a university professor, is an
  ordinary, insecure, middle-class suburban
  teenager preoccupied with boys, diets, and
  popularity. Her fortunes take a sharp turn for
  the worse when her family moves to a new town and
  she finds herself less popular and more isolated
  than ever before. Unhappy in the new town, she is
  overjoyed to be allowed to return to the old town
  to spend the summer with her grandparents.

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Plot Cont..

• During this stay she is invited to a party by an
  old acquaintance there she unwittingly ingests
  LSD that had been added to random bottles of
  Coca-Cola and distributed to the party guests as
  a game. The other guests had mistakenly assumed
  she was aware of what the "game" entailed. After
  this first unwitting, but pleasurable experience,
  she seeks drugs deliberately, and rapidly
  proceeds to marijuana,and amphetamines. She
  describes her drug experiences intricately the
  more extreme the supposed diarist's drug
  experience, the more sophisticated and
  descriptive her writing becomes.

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Plot Cont..

• A pregnancy scare and the return to her new town
  encourage her to turn away from drugs however
  she soon willingly falls in with the drug crowd
  where finally she finds acceptance. She starts
  dating a drug dealer and sells drugs to
  grade-schoolers for him. After realizing he was
  using her, she turns him in to the police and
  runs away from home with her new friend Chris,
  moving to San Francisco. She opens a boutique
  with Chris, however she misses her family. After
  being given heroin and then being raped by Chris'
  boss, Shelia, and her boyfriend, she and Chris
  return home.

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Plot Cont

• She is welcomed back warmly by her family, but
  finds herself ostracized by the community and has
  difficulty keeping her resolve to avoid drugs.
  She soon weakens and, while high, runs away
  again. She spends time living on the streets, a
  period during which her diary is not dated and
  entries were purportedly recorded on scraps of
  paper or paper napkins. She finds herself having
  sexual relations with strangers and loses track
  of everything, but her fear for her family
  finally gives her enough courage to ask a priest
  to help her return home.

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Plot Cont..

• When she returns home she vows to stay completely
  off drugs, and succeeds, even without the support
  of Chris who has now moved away. However, she is
  again ostracized by her former friends, who
  continue to label her a police informant, and is
  ignored by the "square" kids. She starts a new
  romance with a student, Joel, at her father's
  university.

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Plot Conti

• While babysitting, she is drugged without her
  knowledge. She has a violent, bad trip, during
  which a neighbor locks her in the closet, where
  she badly injures herself trying to claw her way
  out, and she is committed to a psychiatric
  hospital. After being released, she returns home,
  finally happy and over her drug addiction. She
  gets her life back on track and finally makes the
  decision to stop keeping a diary.

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Plot Conti

• An editorial note informs readers that three
  weeks after the last entry, the diarist died of
  an overdose. Although it is unclear whether the
  girl's overdose was accidental or premeditated,
  or what drug or drugs specifically prompted her
  death, the key issue is that this girl -- whose
  life the reader has followed in intimate detail
  -- was just one of the thousands who died because
  of drugs that year