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Go Ask Alice

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Go Ask Alice Anonymous ... Grace Slick wrote the song based on perceived drug references in the classic novel Alice In Wonderland. (On July 14 ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Go Ask Alice


1
Go Ask Alice
  • Anonymous

2
(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
9
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.

10
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.

13
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.

15
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.

16
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

17
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

18
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.

19
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.

20
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

22
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.

23
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.")

24
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.

25
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.

26
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.

27
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.

28
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.

29
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.

30
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
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