64 pages • 2-hour read
The Fault in Our Stars
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Chapters 14-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary
On the plane home, Augustus wonders why Peter Van Houten acted like he was angry at them personally. That night, Hazel eats dinner with her dad; it is the first long conversation between the two of them in the novel. He tells her that he and Hazel’s mother knew about the recurrence of Augustus’s cancer before the trip, but they respected his wishes to tell Hazel himself. Hazel’s dad brings up An Imperial Affliction, remarking that he found the book disingenuous and “defeatist” in its outlook; as a biochemist, his perspective is that “the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased towards consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed” (222).
The next day, Hazel goes to Augustus’s house, where he is already receiving powerful and painful chemotherapy drugs through a dedicated IV line. Isaac comes over, and they talk about his ex-girlfriend, Monica, who hasn’t contacted Isaac once since he lost his eye. Outraged at her callousness, Augustus directs Hazel to get the car for a mission. They drive to the store to buy eggs and then head to Monica’s house, where Isaac—with help from his sighted friends—hurls the eggs at her car. When Monica’s mother comes out, Augustus fearlessly tells her that her daughter deserves to have her car egged by a blind man, and she retreats back inside. Once the eggs are gone, they speed away.
Chapter 15 Summary
The chapter begins with the two families at dinner together. Hazel and Augustus trade inside jokes about their dinner in Amsterdam, and the parents all agree with Augustus’s dad’s pronouncement that “our children are weird” (230).A week later, Augustus ends up in the ER with chest pain. Hazel can’t see him at the hospital, so she scrolls through her photos and reflects on how she feels like she’s known him a long time. When he gets out, Hazel drives him to the sculpture garden where he took her for a picnic before. Looking at the Funky Bones sculpture, Augustus says he feels like the skeleton.
Chapter 16 Summary
Hazel begins this chapter describing “a typical day with late-stage Gus” (234). He can’t keep food down anymore, so he is fed through a feeding tube, and he is confined to a wheelchair, “no longer the muscular, gorgeous boy who stared at me in Support Group, but still half smiling, still smoking his unlit cigarette, his blue eyes bright and alive” (234). He feels nostalgic for everything, even Hazel’s old swing set. They play video games in bed, and Hazel admires his determination to save people and sacrifice himself, even in the game world. She considers pretending to choke so that he can give her a life-saving Heimlich maneuver but decides that if he isn’t able to perform the Heimlich, she will have to reveal the ruse and offend his dignity even more. She returns home that night, and they do the same thing the next day.
Chapter 17 Summary
A month after the Amsterdam trip, Augustus’s condition has deteriorated so severely that Hazel goes over to his house to find him mumbling incoherently, having wet the bed. She is embarrassed for him and hopes he doesn’t remember that she found him that way, but he does. They talk about obituaries, and Augustus complains that he’d always thought newspapers would carry notice of his death because he’d do something special with his life. Hazel lashes out with frustration, saying, “‘I just want to be enough for you, but I never can be. This can never be enough for you. But this is all you get. You get me, and your family, and this world. This is your life. I’m sorry it sucks. But you’re not going to be the first man on Mars’” (240). She tries to apologize, but he brushes her off, and they just play video games.
Chapters 14-17 Analysis
The return from Amsterdam, and the beginning of Augustus’s final illness, inaugurates a dramatic shift in the novel’s perspective, as well as its style. The chapters of this section are terse and brusque: while the four chapters of the Amsterdam section (10-13) occupy more than a hundred pages, the following seven (Chapters 14-20) take about forty. A realistic, unexpurgated representation of the horrible pain of cancer is on full view in this section; each chapter reveals a further step in Augustus’s decline. First, he can no longer walk and is confined to a wheelchair; next, he can no longer eat and is fed through a feeding tube; finally, he can no longer control his bowels. But even more harrowing than this succession of bodily indignities is the gradual erasure of Augustus’s personality: dialogue is kept to a minimum, as the clever banter Hazel and Augustus have shared gives way to a stultifying, increasingly medicated routine of napping and video games.
A stylistic change in this section suggests that Augustus’s deterioration affects Hazel, too. Her narrative voice in these chapters is no longer searching and philosophical, the portrait of a rich interiority, but rather dry and factual, the record of a steady decline. “A typical day with late-stage Gus,” begins one chapter, which then continues in this mode of detached reporting (234). Hazel’s father offers one potentially affirmative way to understand this change when he tells Hazel that “the universe wants to be noticed” (222). As the narrative almost seems to slip out of the first person and into the third, Hazel’s father’s words suggest a value to be found in outward observation.
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