The Fault In Our Stars (Rebecca Quinol)

Title of Book: The Fault In Our Stars
Author: John Green
# of Pages: 313
Star Rating: ☆☆☆☆

 Why This Book has Value:

The Fault In Our Stars is a gripping novel that captures what life is like while living with a terminal illness.  The story follows Hazel Grace Lancaster, a 16-year-old girl who has had an unfortunate encounter with thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs.  Her rather monotonous life of reality TV, support group, and doctors appointments is suddenly turned upside down upon meeting Augustus Waters, a charismatic cancer survivor/ leg amputee.  Together they bond over Hazel's favorite novel, An Imperial Affliction written by the ever so elusive Peter Van Houten.  Hazel and Augustus manage to correspond with Van Houten's assistant in order to discover the unwritten fate's of AIA's characters, only to discover that the once great author is now a depressed alcoholic who is incapable of finishing the story seeing as he is no longer the same man who wrote the novel.  Their trip to discover the unwritten ending to An Imperial Affliction goes awry leading to the catastrophe of a lifetime.

Setting

During Hazel and Augustus' journey to meet Van Houten, they have the opportunity to visit the Anne Frank House.  This is a direct connection to the World War II era.  I feel that Hazel visiting the Frank House also connects the suffering of the two young girls.  But that's the thing about pain, "'Pain demands to be felt,'"(Green 57).  In both situations Anne and Hazel are facing their inevitable deaths. Even though Hazel isn't facing mass genocide, she is facing murder from within, "'There's nothing you can do about it'"(Green 10).  This is an important bridge between eras to show the difference between what society was fighting back then to what society is fighting now; the inexorable tragedy of terminal illness.

Universal Human Experiences

This novel does an excellent job at recognizing the universal need of love and the acceptance of others.  Augustus at one point tells Hazel, "'Oh, I wouldn't mind, Hazel Grace.  It would be a privilege to have my heart broken by you'"(Green 176).  At one point or another, we all let others into our lives, thus exposing our weaknesses and bearing the most intimate parts of our soul for them to see.  We therefore give them permission to do what they please even if that means leaving entirely.  It's a complicated bond between needing love and gaining acceptance.  Hazel faces this first hand when confronted with an existential crisis upon returning from Amsterdam.  Much of the novel relates to accepting things as they are as they cannot be controlled and coming to terms with what  the consequences of love may entail.

Description

John Green certainly spared no extent when it came to the myriad of stupendous vocabulary and his impeccable writing style.  The texts feels almost as if it were ripped directly out of Hazel's thoughts.  Every emotion down to the screaming in outrage was captured to the point that the reader feels transported into another body, another life.  Hazel, being a college student, must have a endless amount of fierce vocabulary.  Not only does Green convey that she speaks in such ways but she also thinks as if she could be reading straight out of a dictionary.  Her feeling as a teenage girl are captured perfectly from the annoyance with her parents, to her overwhelming attraction to Augustus.  However the reality of being a cancer patient wasn't left out either.  "I was thinking a lot about how they’d made this place exist even though it should’ve been underwater, and how I was for Dr. Maria a kind of Amsterdam, a half drowned anomaly, and that made me think about dying"(Green 172).  The novel flawlessly portrays what life would be like in a terminally ill 16-year-old girl drying of cancer.

Themes

There are several overarching themes to this story but personally I feel that the fear of oblivion is the main theme that Green was trying to transmit.  Throughout the novel the subject of oblivion is repeatedly brought up.  We first come across the subject when Augustus is first introduced to the reader.  He voices his fear for it to which Hazel speaks,

“There will come a time,” I said, “when all of us are dead.  All of us.  There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything.  There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you.  Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this”- I gestured encompassingly- “will have been for naught.  Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it its millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever.  There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after.  And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.  God knows that’s what everyone else does.”  (Green 12)

Although seemingly harsh, what Hazel says is very true.  Why fear the inevitable when it cannot be prevented?  Well that’s quite simple too.  Humans are scared of what they cannot control, for instance, the obliteration of our existence.  It’s one big paradox.  Oblivion is repeatedly brought up by Green even when Augustus declares his love for Hazel.  “‘I’m in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we’re all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we’ll ever have, and I am in love with you’” (Green 153).  The author is trying to convey that we  as humans must come to accept the unacceptable if we are to ever live in peace and happiness.