‘I fell in love the way you fall asleep, slowly, then all at once’ (Green). Hazel Grace is a sixteen-year-old girl, who has been suffering thyroid cancer since the age of thirteen. Since her lungs are so badly damage caused by the cancer, she is connected to an oxygen tank in order to be able to breath. She is obligated by her mother to go to a cancer support group where she meets a young, handsome boy named Augustus Waters. Augustus is a seventeen-year-old boy, survivor from osteosarcoma, which falls in love with Hazel at the moment he sees her. Both create a relationship together where they fight the struggles that are presented to them and share the obsession over a book named, An Imperial Affliction by the fictional author Peter Van Houten. The Fault in our Stars is not just a book that portrays the hard times that a teen or any person at any age goes through cancer physically, but also what actually true love is and the power it has. The courage that it takes for a person to take cancer as part of their lives and the fears they create.
John Green creates this story where the characters take cancer as a member of their lives by making it seem as something that they have known forever and explain what is really to live with it. It is portrayed by the way Hazel explains an idea of what are the real side effects of cancer, in this case depression. She describes it by saying, ‘depression is not a side effect of cancer. Depression is a side effect of dying. (Cancer is also a side effect of dying. Almost everything is, really)’ (Green). She explaining that by having cancer, people know that they will not be able to live long enough and that their body can fail at any moment, but in some way they still fight. Green in some way creates this book in some kind of a philosophical work where he question whether is it really worth it to fight when in some cases people will not achieve it. He questions, what is what they are really achieving.
The author has a skill that helps him create his characters at a point where the audience knows how the characters feel, think and what they fear and eventually relate to them. As Beimers commented, Green ‘appears to be more capable at telling a story from a female point of view than most women writers are today’. Hazel is described as a girl that fears to hurt the people around her. She mentions, ‘”What am I at war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They’re made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war’with a predetermined winner.” (Green). She becomes the disease and she is scared of infecting the people around her. She is scared that when she is dead the people around her will not be able to move along with their lives. It may be that ‘Hazel is all of these negatives wrapped up in her end-of-her-world melodrama’ (Starkehaus), but Green wants to portray how people become depress and forget about hope. As for Augustus he fears oblivion. He fears that after his dead nobody will remember him and be just someone who fought for cancer. He is scared of not making something important for the world. Green portrays that ‘The real heroes anyway aren’t the people doing things; the real heroes are the people NOTICING things, paying attention’. (Green)
After the author shows how depressing and hurtful cancer can be, he also show what’s love and the power it has. Green does not talks about any kind of teenage couple relationship but about a real relationship where they are struggles, there’s kindness and caring between the couple. Augustus tries everything to accomplish the dream of Hazel which is find out what happens to the characters of the book she is obsessed on. The portrays how with love it can overcome the hard times and that during those hard times the couple can stick together no matter what will happen during the future. It shows how love will cause them not to hurt them or prevent it. When Hazel knows that she has fallen in love with Augustus she tells him, ‘I am a grenade and at some point I am going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties okay?” (Green). She cares for him that he doesn’t want to hurt him. When Augustus is confirmed that has cancer for a second time he promises Hazel that he will fight and during that fight Hazel never let’s go. The book shows what love is really capable of.
After all the book might be a sad, but the way Green’s words are ‘oftentimes breathtaking, and some portions of the novel are so perfectly structured that even the smallest details are turned into moments of real poignancy’ (Beimers). It shows how people need a lot of courage to live and overcome their biggest enemy. And how love can change everything. ‘But it’s not a cancer book’ because cancer books suck.” (Minzesheimer).