Paper Towns: Part 3, Agloe Summary & Analysis

Driving on highway outside Roscoe, a town near the intersection where Agloe General Store supposedly stands, Quentin and his friend spot a crumbling barn in the field beside a dirt road. Lacey recognizes Margo’s car parked outside the barn, and Quentin leaps out of the car and runs to investigate. Ben, Radar, and Lacey follow him into the barn. Inside, they find Margo writing in her notebook. She seems completely unsurprised to see them. She stares at Quentin and he thinks that her eyes look silent and dead; she reminds him of Robert Joyner, staring through his blank eyes.

Margo asks for five minutes to finish writing. When she closes her notebook, she offers each of them a tepid hug or handshake. She seems at a loss for what to say, and Quentin is disappointed that there is not more drama in this moment — no tears or embraces. She asks what they are doing in Agloe, and when Lacey says how worried they have been, Margo brushes her off with chipper comments about being “A-OK.” Her cavalier attitude infuriates Lacey, who calls Margo a bitch and storms out of the barn. Ben and Radar follow her, but Quentin stays behind.

With the others gone, Margo and Quentin launch into a massive fight. Margo is angry at Quentin for coming to Agloe, telling him she intended to break from every connection she had. She accuses him of using her to play the hero and expecting her gratitude as a prize for discovering her. Quentin accuses Margo of being selfish, not thinking about how her disappearance would affect Ruthie, or her friends. He tells her he couldn’t move on from losing her because he thought she had killed herself.

Quentin’s criticisms send Margo into a fit of temper, which has the odd effect of calming Quentin down. She asks Quentin how he found her, and he explains the trail of clues. He tells Margo about his theory that she had killed herself in a pseudovision and wanted him to find her body. Margo apologizes for her anger, and tells Quentin she has been thinking about him — and her family — a lot since she left. She tells him she was afraid to maintain ties to anyone in Orlando, because those ties might eventually compel her to go back.

Lacey calls Quentin’s cell phone, asking to speak to Margo. While they talk, apparently amiably, Quentin explores the barn. He finds Margo’s books: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. When Margo finishes her call with Lacey, she tells Quentin that his friends are staying at a nearby motel, and will be leaving in the morning with or without him. She tells Quentin she has made plans to leave for New York City that day. She adds that her original plan was to leave Orlando on graduation night rather than three weeks before, as she did, but that she made last-minute adjustments when she found out Jase was cheating on her.

Quentin asks Margo to explain her plan, to help him understand what was and wasn’t intentional, and what everything meant. Margo begins by showing him her notebook. She explains that, when she was ten years old, she began writing a detective story in which she and Quentin, together with a talking version of Myrna Mountweazel, investigate the death of Robert Joyner, who in her version of the story is murdered by his demon-possessed brother-in-law rather than taking his own life. Quentin is a heroic love interest for Margo in this mystery, and the Spiegelmans are doting parents who shower her with presents. After finishing the story in fifth grade, Margo explains, she used the notebook to plan her pranks and schemes, writing new ideas on top of the pages that she had already filled with her mystery.

Margo tells Quentin that she began planning her final night in Orlando during their junior year of high school, and that she always intended to bring him along as her partner. She hoped that she could liberate Quentin through a night of adventure, and inspire him to become the hero she imagined him to be in her childhood story. When they finally had their night together, Margo tells him, she was surprised to find how much she loved being with him — after imagining him as a two-dimensional boy for years, she was amazed to see him as a real person. She tells him the clues that lead him to the strip mall — whose real name, she reveals, is The Osprey —were thrown together hastily. She wanted to give him the place, where she spent so much time during high school, as a gift to help him become a braver person. She tells Quentin she never meant to worry him, and that she tried to paint over the troubling graffiti about going to the paper towns and never coming back.

Quentin asks Margo why she would come to Agloe, of all places. Margo explains that she has always felt like a “paper girl,” more flimsy and artificial even than the people who surrounded her. She says she loved being reduced to a beautiful idea, and encouraged others to see her that way because it made them love her. Still, she knew she had to force herself to become a real person. She tells Quentin she was drawn to Agloe because it was a place where something fictitious —the copyright trap that existed only in the world of the map — became real. Quentin tells her again how he feared she was dead, and Margo reads him a passage from The Bell Jar about how fruitless it would be to kill a body when the thing one wants to kill is much deeper —for Margo, the parts of herself that feel painfully empty and false.

Quentin encourages Margo to come home with him, telling her she can stay with his family until she starts college. Margo insists she cannot go back to Orlando, claiming it will be to easy for her to begin believing in superficial things — not just popularity, but college and the other trappings of a successful life she has chosen to reject. Quentin acknowledges to himself that he still believes in the value of things like family and education. He tries to convince Margo that going to college, at least, is important, but she scoffs. He asks what she plans to do in the long term, and Margo quotes Emily Dickinson: “Forever is composed of nows.”

Margo borrows Quentin’s phone and calls her family. She has a tense conversation with her mother, then talks briefly with Ruthie, apologizing for not calling her and promising to call every Tuesday from then on. When she hangs up, she screams. Her mother has told her about having changed the locks, and Margo is hurt by that gesture. She also feels guilty for having gone so long without speaking to Ruthie.

Margo and Quentin walk through the fields outside the barn, and he tells her everything that has happened since her disappearance. Quentin takes Margo’s hand. They lie down in the field, and Margo talks about how surprising it was to find, on the night before she left, how similar Quentin was to the hero she imagined in her story. She tells him nothing ever happens like you imagine it will, and Quentin answers that, if you don’t imagine, nothing ever happens. He understands that, as impossible as it is to imagine the mind of another person— or another vision for the world, or anything at all — the act of imagination is the only way for a person to reach outside themselves. Margo rests her head on Quentin’s shoulder, and they fall asleep.

Quentin wakes around sunset, and sees Margo digging a few feet from him. He kneels next to her and begins to dig as well. She tells him they are “digging graves for Little Margo and Little Quentin and puppy Myrna Mountweazel and poor dead Robert Joyner.” They make the grave carefully, though they only have their hands to dig with.

Margo tells Quentin that she never thought of Robert Joyner as a real person, and instead thought of him as a minor character in the drama of her life. Quentin realizes he has done the same thing. He tells Margo he has always found her metaphor — of strings breaking inside Joyner —compelling, but that there are other ways of thinking about life and death and brokenness. The metaphor of string implies that a person can be broken beyond repair, while Whitman’s metaphor of grass implies that people are tied together and can live through one another. Quentin suggests an alternative metaphor: that people are vessels who start out perfect but become cracked over time, and that it is only by looking through the cracks that people begin to see one another clearly.

Quentin kisses Margo. Margo asks Quentin to come to New York with her, but they both understand that it will not happen. Quentin tries to explain the reasons he can’t go with her, telling her that he has a life in Orlando, but she stops his explanation with another kiss. They bury the notebook, saying “Godspeed” to their childhood selves, and to Robert Joyner. Back in the barn, Quentin helps Margo pack her car.

Margo takes Quentin to the motel where Lacey, Radar, and Ben are staying. They promise to call and write, and Quentin says he will try to visit her later in the summer. He does not know whether any of these things will happen, but knows they have to imagine them to keep themselves from falling apart. Staying behind while she goes on without him is the hardest thing he has ever done. Before getting into her car, Margo turns back to face Quentin. Her eyes are soaked with tears, and Quentin embraces her. They kiss, and he thinks he can see her almost perfectly.