64 pages • 2-hour read
The Fault in Our Stars
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Themes
Sentimental Cancer Narratives
From the very first, Hazel is sharply critical of the prayers, stories, aphorisms, and tropes that dominate discussions of cancer, and especially kids with cancer, from the mantras of the Support Group (“we promise to Live Our Best Life Today”) to the “Encouragements” at Augustus’s house (“Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?”). These platitudes and clichés, and their collective accretion into an ideology of heroic suffering, don’t only mask and ignore the unbearable pain—both emotional and physical—of cancer, they try to transform its essential, unjust malignancy into something redemptive and noble. Hazel rejects these conventions out of hand, and through her, the novel does, too, showing Augustus racked with humiliating, abject pain and showing the power of grief to destroy someone like Van Houten, even as it transforms Hazel into a more compassionate person. The Fault in Our Stars refuses the easy, reassuring path of presenting cancer as a blessing in disguise rather than what it really is: a horrible disease.
The Heroic Observer
Hazel struggles to find meaning in her life, knowing that she won’t live long enough to experience the freedom and fulfillment of adulthood, and thinking that when she dies, she will cause only grief to everyone that loves her. She eventually takes comfort in something her father tells her, a realization he had during an advanced math class in college: that the universe “wants to be noticed” (222). Within the vast, awe-inspiring universe, consciousness itself is a valuable, important thing. Hazel begins to see herself and her awareness, her power of noticing, as a force for good, rather than simply a “grenade” (99) doomed to suffer and cause everyone pain. Augustus picks up on this theme in his final eulogy for Hazel when he writes, “The real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention. The guy who invented the smallpox vaccine didn’t actually invent anything. He just noticed that people with cowpox didn’t get smallpox” (312). The theme of the observer serves as a mission statement for Green, too, and his novelistic goal of portraying cancer kids realistically, without artificial or sentimental tropes to whitewash their pain and suffering.
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