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“Here’s how it went in God’s heart: the six or seven or ten of us walked/wheeled in, grazed at a decrepit selection of cookies and lemonade, sat down in the Circle of Trust, and listened to Patrick recount for the thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story—how he had cancer in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn’t die and now here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working towards a master’s degree that will not improve his career prospects, waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief he escaped those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.
“AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!”
This description of the Support Group and its leader, Patrick, is an introduction to Hazel and her cynical perspective on the culture of cancer survivorship. Hazel is unimpressed by the Support Group rhetoric that treats life and survival like a victory or a blessing, even when the circumstances of that life are clearly far from triumphant. Throughout the novel, Hazel will struggle to find a better reason to survive and to cherish survival for its own sake.
“They were close enough to me that I could hear the weird noises of their mouths together, and I could hear him saying, ‘Always,’ and her saying, ‘Always,’ in return. Suddenly standing next to me, Augustus half whispered, ‘They’re big believers in PDA [...] Always is their thing. They’ll always love each other and whatnot. I would conservatively estimate they have texted each other the word always four million times in the last year.’”
Hazel watches Isaac and his girlfriend, Monica, kissing outside the Support Group. By saying “always” to each other, as a promise of undying love, they are enacting a ritual of teen romance that Hazel, with her shortened life expectancy, will never experience.
“‘They don’t kill you unless you light them,’ he said as Mom arrived at the curb. ‘And I’ve never lit one. It’s a metaphor, you see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing.’”(
Augustus explains to Hazel why he habitually plays with unlit cigarettes. It is revealing of his cerebral, playful character, and of the way he regards mortality: as a cancer kid, the threat of death is extremely real to him, and impossible to ignore, but Augustus refuses to let this hamper or control him.
“His mom sat down next to me and said, ‘I just love this one, don’t you?’ I guess I had been looking toward the Encouragement above the TV, a drawing of an angel with the caption Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?
“(This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.)”
Augustus’s parents have plastered their house with inspirational messages and decorations that they call “Encouragements.” Hazel finds these messages corny and specious. These “Encouragements” show that Hazel’s path through suffering is different, and harder; she refuses the superficial comforts that others turn to.
“It featured a sentence-to-corpse ratio of nearly 1:1, and I tore through it without ever looking up. I liked Staff Sergeant Max Mayhem, even though he didn’t have much in the way of a technical personality, but mostly I liked that his adventures kept happening. There were always more bad guys to kill and more good guys to save. New wars started even before the old ones were won. I hadn’t read a real series like that since I was a kid, and it was exciting to live again in an infinite fiction.”
Hazel is reading the novelization of Augustus’s favorite video game, the first installment of an adventure serial with an effectively immortal protagonist who faces extraordinary dangers, yet always survives. This genre of literature entails a particular attitude toward death, where the deaths of enemies can be enjoyed as entertainment but the death of the hero is inconceivable.
“The Dutch Tulip Man has lots of money and very eccentric ideas about how to treat cancer, but Anna thinks the guy might be a con man and possibly not even Dutch, and then just as the possibly Dutch guy and her mom are about to get married and Anna is about to start this crazy new treatment regimen involving wheatgrass and low doses of arsenic, the book ends right in the middle of a
“I know it’s a very literary decision and everything and probably part of why I love the book so much, but there is something to recommend a story that ends.”
Hazel is plagued with questions about the identity of An Imperial Affliction’s enigmatic Dutch Tulip Man and the fate of the novel’s characters after Anna’s sudden death; these questions motivate the action of the novel’s middle section, when Hazel and Augustus travel to Amsterdam to get answers from the author, Peter Van Houten. Green uses this novel, and Hazel’s obsession with it, to explore Hazel’s fears about her own life and death: whether the “creator” is actually a type of con man and what will happen to her parents after she is gone.
“‘Okay,’ he said.
“‘I gotta go to sleep, it’s almost one.’
“‘Okay,’ I said.
“‘Okay,’ he said.
“I giggled and said, ‘Okay.’ And then the line was quiet but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me. [...]
“‘Okay,’ he said after forever. ‘Maybe okay will be our always.’
“‘Okay,’ I said.”
Unlike Isaac and Monica, or other young couples in relationships, Hazel and Augustus don’t have an “always” to look forward to because Hazel’s cancer is terminal. Replacing “always” with “okay” is emblematic of the kind of love they share, without illusions of perfect or unending happiness.
“‘I’m like a grenade, Mom. I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?’ My dad tilted his head a little to the side, like a scolded puppy. ‘I’m a grenade,’ I said again. ‘I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there’s nothing I can do about hurting you; you’re too invested, so please just let me do that, okay? I’m not depressed. I don’t need to get out more. And I can’t be a regular teenager, because I’m a grenade.’”
Hazel explains to her parents why she doesn’t want to make friends or be in a relationship with Augustus. She feels like her cancer and early death mean that she will hurt the people who love her.
“Everyone in this tale has a rock-solid hamartia: hers, that she is so sick; yours, that you are so well. Were she better or you sicker, then the stars would not be so terribly crossed, but it is the nature of stars to cross, and never was Shakespeare more wrong than when he had Cassius note, ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves.’ Easy enough to say when you’re a Roman nobleman (or Shakespeare!), but there is no shortage of fault to be found amid our stars.”
This passage from Peter Van Houten’s letter to Augustus gives the source of the novel’s title, a line from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It also exemplifies Van Houten’s fatalistic worldview: where Brutus refuses to blame fate (the “stars”) for his unhappiness, Van Houten is happy to blame fate for Augustus’s and Hazel’s, and his own, misfortunes.
“While I was getting eviscerated by chemo, for some reason I decided to feel really hopeful, not about survival specifically, but I felt like Anna does in the book, that feeling of excitement and gratitude about just being able to marvel at it all.”
Augustus explains to Hazel that he made a conscious decision to be hopeful and optimistic at the lowest point of his struggle with cancer, after losing his leg. His positive attitude and determination to observe and enjoy life, even at its worst, distinguishes Augustus’s outlook from Hazel’s more pessimistic one.
“‘Nothing happens to the Dutch Tulip Man. He isn’t a con man or not a con man; he’s God. He’s an obvious and metaphorical representation of God, and asking what becomes of him is the intellectual equivalent of asking what becomes of the disembodied eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in Gatsby. Do he and Anna’s mom get married? We are speaking of a novel, dear child, not some historical enterprise. [...] This childish idea that the author of a novel has some special insight into the characters in the novel...it’s ridiculous. That novel was composed of scratches on a page, dear. The characters inhabiting it have no life outside of those scratches. What happened to them? They all ceased to exist the moment the novel ended.’”
Peter Van Houten’s speech to Hazel about his novel is a profoundly disillusioning moment for her. It is clear from how invested she is in this question of what happens to the characters that there is more at stake for her than these fictional personages; Van Houten recognizes that her questions about the Dutch Tulip Man are about God and her questions about what happens after the novel ends are about the afterlife. His answers are hurtful, but there isn’t an all-knowing Author or Creator, or a sacred book, that can answer these questions for her; she has to find the answers herself.
“I started to feel breathless in a new and fascinating way. The space around us evaporated, and for a weird moment I really liked my body; this cancer-ruined thing I spent years dragging around suddenly seemed worth the struggle, worth the chest tubes and the PICC lines and the ceaseless bodily betrayal of the tumors.”
When Hazel kisses Augustus for the first time, she discovers a kind of pleasure that she hasn’t known before. Coming right after her disillusionment at Van Houten’s house, her choice to embark on a physical relationship with Augustus is not just a sign of her growing maturity but a decision to find enjoyment and fulfillment in the here and now.
“According to Maslow, I was stuck on the second level of the pyramid, unable to feel secure in my health and therefore unable to reach for love and respect and art and whatever else, which is, of course, utter horseshit: The urge to make art or contemplate philosophy does not go away when you are sick. Those urges just become transfigured by illness. Maslow’s pyramid seemed to imply that I was less human than other people, and most people seemed to agree with him.”
Hazel critiques Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, in which one’s health and safety must be satisfied before the higher needs of intellectual satisfaction and self-actualization can be attained. This passage articulates one of the novel’s central goals: to portray kids with cancer in the full richness of their spiritual and intellectual lives.
“‘I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is improbably biased toward consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it—or my observation of it—is temporary?’”
Hazel’s father shares an insight he gained in an advanced mathematics class in college. This perspective remains important to Hazel as she searches for meaning in a life that’s short and full of pain. After Augustus’s death, she is able to simply sit and watch the world around her, needing no more than that, during a picnic with her parents.
“I found him mumbling in a language of his own creation. He’d pissed the bed. It was awful. I couldn’t even look, really. I just shouted for his parents and they came down, and I went upstairs while they cleaned him up.”
As Augustus becomes sicker and sicker, it is difficult for Hazel to adjust to seeing him in undignified states. The humiliating and agonizing ordeals of cancer depicted here and elsewhere in the book deviate from the standard cancer narrative where patients handle their illnesses with grace.
“According to the conventions of the genre, Augustus Waters kept his sense of humor till the end, did not for a moment waiver in his courage, and his spirit soared like an indomitable eagle until the world itself could not contain his joyous soul.
“But this was the truth, a pitiful boy who desperately wanted not to be pitiful, screaming and crying, poisoned by an infected G-tube that kept him alive, but not alive enough.”
Toward the end of Augustus’s life, as cancer eats away at his body, personality, and will to live, Hazel becomes even more dissatisfied with the conventions and ideology of cancer literature, which represent suffering as ennobling, rather than destructive and inhuman. In this sarcastic passage, she imagines how a stereotypical cancer narrative would portray Augustus’s struggles.
“‘Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.’”
In her eulogy for Augustus’s “prefuneral,” Hazel declares that she is glad to have loved Augustus despite the unbearable pain of losing him. While she once wanted to avoid this pain by distancing herself from him and everyone because she has no chance of “forever,” loving him has made her realize that both the joy of love and the agony of loss are worth it.
“I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again and again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned.”
Hazel compares her grief after Augustus’s death to a “ten” on the pain scale, worse than anything she experienced during her hardest days battling cancer. In moments of extreme emotion, Green often returns to water and ocean imagery, as a way for Hazel and other characters to picture what is bigger and more powerful than they are.
“I went on spouting bullshit Encouragements as Gus’s parents, arm in arm, hugged each other and nodded at every word. Funerals, I had decided, are for the living.”
At Augustus’s funeral, Hazel gives a eulogy full of the “encouraging” platitudes she has excoriated through the entire novel (and continues to privately despise as “bullshit”) for the simple reason that they give comfort to Augustus’s parents in their grief. A more mature and compassionate Hazel emerges after Augustus dies.
“‘You don’t want an explanation?’ he asked.
“‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m good. I think you’re a pathetic alcoholic who says fancy things to get attention like a really precocious eleven-year-old and I feel super bad for you.’”
Hazel refuses Peter Van Houten’s offer of an explanation of what happened to the characters in An Imperial Affliction. By this point, Hazel either no longer reveres him as an all-knowing being or no longer feels she needs the answers to what happens after a person’s story ends in order to know that that person’s time was worthwhile.
“My old stock answer was that I wanted to stay alive for my parents, because they would be all gutted and childless in the wake of me, and that was still true kind of, but that wasn’t it, exactly. [...] I felt that I owed a debt to the universe that only my attention could repay, and also that I owed a debt to everybody who didn’t get to be a person anymore and everyone who hadn’t gotten to be a person yet.”
At Support Group, Patrick surprises Hazel by asking her a challenging question, rather than giving her a soothing cliché. When she says she wants to die, he asks, “Why don’t you?” Hazel realizes that she does have a reason to live beyond just keeping her parents from being sad; she thinks she gives something to the universe by being there to observe it. This is the first time she fully articulates a positive “meaning” for her life, rather th an a wish to cause as little pain as possible.
“I was crying. I couldn’t get over how happy I was, crying genuine tears of real actual happiness for the first time in maybe forever, imagining my mom as a Patrick. It made me think of Anna’s mom. She would’ve been a good social worker, too.”
When Hazel learns that her mom has been secretly studying to become a counselor like Patrick, the Support Group leader, she is overcome with happiness at imagining a happy future after her death. She realizes that this is what she wanted when she wondered about Anna’s mom’s future in the novel, too: reassurance that her death wouldn’t destroy her parents’ lives.
“I missed the future. Obviously I knew before his recurrence that I’d never grow old with Augustus Waters. But thinking about Lidewij and her boyfriend, I felt robbed. I would probably never again see the ocean from thirty thousand feet above, so far up that you can’t make out the waves or any boats, so that the ocean is a great and endless monolith. I could imagine it. I could remember it. But I couldn’t see it again, and it occurred to me that the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true.”
Even at the end of the novel, Hazel is still subject to envy and regret over what healthy people have that she never will: adult relationships, the possibility of a love that lasts years or a lifetime, and the feeling, like the one she got on the plane, that the world is her oyster. Even though she is more serene and positive, she never becomes the pure, heroic martyr of conventional cancer stories.
“I was just trying to notice everything: the light on the ruined Ruins, this little kid who could barely walk discovering a stick at the corner of the playground, my indefatigable mother zigzagging mustard across a turkey sandwich, my dad putting his handheld in his pocket and resisting the urge to check it, a guy throwing a Frisbee that his dog kept running under and catching and returning to him.”
Hazel’s newfound dedication to observing the universe gives her a kind of quiet happiness in people-watching at the park. This passage is an example of what her father’s insight, that the universe wants to be observed, looks like as a philosophy of life—simply noticing the world and its people, without judgment.
“We are like a bunch of dogs squirting on fire hydrants. We poison the groundwater with our toxic piss, marking everything MINE in a ridiculous attempt to survive our deaths. [...] Hazel is different. She walks lightly, old man. She walks lightly upon the earth.”
Augustus’s eulogy for Hazel outlines the contours of a different kind of hero: not the person who makes a mark on the world, but the person who doesn’t. His words serve as a clear description of the new kind of protagonist Green has tried to create and celebrate in the novel.
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By John Green