Go Ask Alice Literary Elements

Young adult fiction, epistolatory novel

Two small towns in California, also Berkeley, San Francisco, New York City, and various towns in Colorado and Oregon

First person singular, in the form of diary entries

The mood for the most part is pessimistic and frustrated, however there is a petulant tone that reflects the Diarist's belligerent and entitled attitude toward everyone and everything in the adult world.

The Diarist is the protagonist. She regards her family and her father in particular as antagonists, however the real antagonists are Chris, Doris, and the other people who lure the Diarist deeper and deeper into drug culture.

The biggest conflict in the book is the Diarist's increasing helplessness with regard to her out of control drug habit. The story depicts her ongoing downward slide as she becomes willing to do almost anything to get her next drug experience.

The climax of the book is when the Diarist's former friends drug her without her knowledge, sending her on a "bad trip" during which she hallucinates, loses control of her behavior, and is sent to a psychiatric hospital.

The Diarist's eventual loss of control (and death) are foreshadowed by the lapse of her resolve to stay away from drugs the first time she returns home. She also writes: "I don’t want to get old. I have this very silly fear, dear friend, that one day I’ll be old, without ever having really been young."

"It seems like every family has to have one goon, guess who's it on this homestead?" The Diarist accepts her identity as a failure and as the black sheep of the family group, and proceeds to live down to their expectations of her.

"I bet the pill is harder to get than drugs--which shows how screwed up this world really is!" The reference is to birth control pills which were newly available for women to take to prevent pregnancy. Available to women only with a prescription for political reasons, and not universally available at the time the book was written, birth control pills were indeed more difficult to obtain than some street drugs.

The Diarist makes frequent reference to blood, once saying that people bleed "on the inside" when they are upset.

The Diarist feels accepted and loved only when she is using drugs among other drug users, however her increasingly egregious behavior in pursuit of the next high alienates her from normal people to the point where her drug use makes it difficult for her to fit in anywhere else.

Each of the Diarist's runaway attempts follows a similar pattern: trouble at home, a sudden impulse to leave, a misadventure involving another young woman who leads her into increasing drug induced depravity, and a decision to return home.

The Diarist believes that adult society, and teachers in particular, are part of a vaguely repressive force: “The same old dumb teachers teaching the same old dumb subjects in the same old dumb school." They behave as a mindless collective out to persecute all teens, and the Diarist in particular.

The Priest personifies religious redemption. He is instrumental in getting the Diarist to return home again.