Margo Roth Spiegelman's Journey

Flimsy as paper, Orlando has held Margo Roth Spiegelman captive for over eighteen years. She discovers how fake the people inside of the city behave. Before graduation, she escapes her life to explore and figure out who she is. However, Quentin, the boy who loves an unrealistic version of Margo, chases her, but he discovers she transforms into a person Quentin does not know anymore. Margo, insecure and just another papergirl to others, attempts to destroy everything in her paper town that harms her on one final mission, but instead she hurts herself in the long run because she pushes back the people who care about her. A couple weeks before graduation, Margo convinces Quentin, a boy she has not spoken to in nine years, to embark on a revenge plot against all of the people who have wronged her. During the journey, John Green, the author, shows the readers Margo’s broken interior that has been stomped on by her ex-boyfriend and so-called friends.

Margo believes everyone sticks to the status quo, and they all try so hard, but in the end they miss the little things of life. The town is “not even hard enough to be made of plastic” (Green 57). No one ventures into the unknown because everyone sticks to what they know. Margo pushes Quentin during her final night to “shut up and calm down and stop being so goddamned terrified of every little adventure” (Green 69). Before the mission, Quentin acts afraid of things that could hurt him like everyone else in Orlando. In the end Quentin jumps into the unknown by driving to New York in search of a girl he barely knows. Quentin perceives Margo as, “the most gorgeous creature God has every created” (Green 4). Quentin only focuses on her outer beauty, and the things he saw as a little kid. He looks at Margo as if she was a papergirl, two-dimensional and chiffon. Quentin’s brain blocks out the ugly, real part of Margo, who he finally meets when he finds the missing