64 pages • 2-hour read
The Fault in Our Stars
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Chapters 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary
Hazel tells a bit more about her favorite novel, An Imperial Affliction. The novel centers on a girl named Anna, who suffers from a rare form of blood cancer and decides to make the world a better place by starting The Anna Foundation for People with Cancer Who Want to Cure Cholera. Anna lives with her mother, a gardener with a passion for tulips who falls in love with a mysterious and eccentric trader known only as the Dutch Tulip Man. Anna wonders whether he is a con man, but when he and her mother are about to marry, the book suddenly ends, midsentence. As much as Hazel loves the book, the unfinished ending drives her crazy:
I [understand] the story ended because Anna died or got too sick to write and this midsentence thing [is] supposed to reflect how life really ends and whatever […] but there [are] characters other than Anna in the story, and it [seems] unfair that I [will] never find out what happened to them (49).
Hazel has written numerous letters to Van Houten care of his publisher, asking what happens to Anna’s mother, the Dutch Tulip Man, and the other characters, but has never received a response. Van Houten moved to the Netherlands after publishing An Imperial Affliction and has never written any other books.
When Augustus finishes An Imperial Affliction, he texts Hazel to express his own frustration with the book’s nonending and to invite her over. Hazel goes to his house, where Isaac is sitting in Augustus’s room, playing video games and unabashedly crying. His girlfriend, Monica, has dumped him after learning that Isaac will lose his one remaining eye to cancer. She didn’t want to dump a blind guy, so she ended the relationship before his operation. Isaac is inconsolable; the normal angst and melodrama of a teenage breakup is compounded, for him, by the knowledge that he will soon be blind. While Hazel thinks about the impossibility of relationships for cancer kids, Augustus encourages Isaac to express his pain and rage by smashing some of Augustus’s old basketball trophies because, he says—quoting An Imperial Affliction—“pain demands to be felt” (63).
Chapter 5 Summary
After the night when Isaac breaks the trophies, Hazel waits anxiously for Augustus to call. When he does call about a week later, he has incredible news: he has gotten in touch with Peter Van Houten through an email to his Dutch assistant, Lidewij. In his email, Van Houten thanks Augustus for reaching out but says he has no plans to write anything else. Having gotten hold of his email address, Hazel excitedly composes a message to Van Houten, asking once again what happens to the characters in An Imperial Affliction after the novel ends. While waiting for him to respond, Hazel visits Isaac in the hospital, where he has undergone the operation to remove his remaining eye. They trade cynical jokes about nurses on cancer wards and whether his other senses will sharpen to compensate for the lack of sight.
When Van Houten finally responds, he refuses to tell Hazel the fates of the characters—but promises to meet and discuss them with her if she should ever make it to Amsterdam. Hazel, wild with hope, calls to her mom and asks if they can take a trip there, but her mom explains that they can’t afford it. On the phone, Hazel laments to Augustus that she’s already used her “wish” from the Genie Foundation (a fictional version of the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which provides wishes to sick children) on a trip to Disney World when she was 13.
That weekend, Augustus takes Hazel on a surprise picnic to the sculpture garden at a local museum, where they admire a skeleton sculpture called Funky Bones. After giving Hazel tulips, orange juice, and a Dutch cheese sandwich, Augustus announces that he has used his wish—saved up from when he lost his leg—to schedule a trip to Amsterdam with Hazel to meet Peter Van Houten. They almost kiss, but Hazel shrinks away.
Chapter 6 Summary
After a consultation with Hazel’s oncologist, the Amsterdam trip is approved, on the condition that Hazel’s mom goes along to monitor her condition. Hazel talks to Kaitlyn about her reluctance to enter into a romantic relationship with Augustus, despite having feelings for him. Out of curiosity, Hazel Goggles his former girlfriend, Caroline Mathers, who passed away from cancer a year ago, and reads the grief messages posted by her friends and family on social media, as well as the notes Caroline’s mother kept about her deteriorating condition. This confirms Hazel’s feeling that it is irresponsible for someone with her disease to fall in love or have a relationship, because her early death will cause only pain to everyone who loves her, as she tells her parents: “‘I’m like a grenade, Mom. I’m a grenade and someday I’m going to blow up and I’d like to minimize the casualties, okay?’” (99).Hazel texts Augustus to tell him they can’t be together because she doesn’t want to hurt him one day, and she goes to sleep after her parents reassure her that “the joy you bring us is greater than the sadness we feel about your illness” (102). She wakes in the middle of the night in excruciating pain.
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
The incipient romance between Hazel and Augustus is explored, indirectly, through two other stories of relationships between cancer kids: Isaac and his girlfriend Monica, and Augustus and his girlfriend Caroline Mathers. These relationships don’t end well. When Monica dumps Isaac on the eve of the surgery that will take his remaining eye, he is heartbroken, but Hazel sees Monica’s side: it isn’t fair, she reasons, to expect Monica to bear the suffering Isaac’s illness will cause. The story of Caroline Mathers and her agonizing death from brain cancer reinforces Hazel’s idea that to love a cancer kid is, inevitably, to suffer—and, therefore, it is wrong to let anyone love a “grenade” like her (99). This is Hazel’s central moral dilemma, and the novel’s as well: is it worthwhile to love despite the grief and suffering it brings?
The other major theme that develops in this section is the value of literature, and literary authority, as a guiding light in life’s struggles. As Hazel comes to the pessimistic decision that she cannot pursue her feelings for Augustus because she’s a “grenade” (99), she is simultaneously buoyed by the prospect of meeting her favorite author, Peter Van Houten. An Imperial Affliction is like a holy book to her, and her burning questions about what happens after the novel ends echo the questions about the afterlife that a Christian, for instance, might seek answers for in the Bible—or from the Bible’s “author.” The juxtaposition of these themes—a turning away from human relationships and an expectation of enlightenment from an otherworldly author—will eventually come to a head.
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