The Fault In Our Stars, By John Green

People with diseases such as cancer not only suffer from an internal struggle, living every day on the brink of death, but they also suffer from the negative perceptions by society. When people are known to have diseases, they are viewed as weak. Even if they are pitied, they are not viewed in the same light as somebody who is healthy. In The Fault in Our Stars, author John Green represents this struggle with a plethora of literary elements such as symbolism and first person point-of-view and manages to create a story of love and friendship despite the dark themes of the novel.
Throughout the novel, the main protagonist, Hazel Grace Lancaster, struggles from not only a fight between her body and lungs as a sufferer of lung cancer, but she
Augustus, on the other hand, lives by his own rules. Augustus tries to control the thing he fears so much,cancer,(even if metaphorically) while Hazel continuously gives in to cancer and the omnipresence of death throughout the novel. When it is eventually revealed that Augustus’s cancer has returned and that Augustus has little time to live, Augustus remains strong despite the deterioration of his physical body. One night Augustus calls Hazel at 2:35 in the morning telling her that he is “at the gas station” and that something was “wrong with [his] G-tube…”( Green 242-243). When Hazel finds him, he is “covered in his own vomit”(Green 244). She immediately thinks that Augustus must have ventured out for a very serious reason if he were to risk his life for it;however, Augustus tells her that he simply “‘wanted to buy a pack of cigarettes”’(Green 244). It may sound insane for Augustus to have risked his life over something he does not even use, but to him it symbolically meant so much more. At this point of the novel, Augustus was at his lowest and weakest point, and he needed something, anything to keep control of his situation, even though deep down he knows there is
It is fair to say that Hazel is a relatively likable narrator. Through her writing, she appears intelligent, but at the same time very humorous and down to earth. The events and the major themes of the book are in essence, very somber, but Hazel manages to retell her story with much more lightheartedness than one would expect. It must still be noted that Hazel is a normal girl. She is just not viewed or treated the same way that any other girl would be treated because of her constantly interfering disease. When Hazel is on her way to Amsterdam with her mother and Augustus, in the airport, she claims that she “could feel everybody watching [her], wondering what was wrong with [her], and whether it would kill [her]...”(Green 144). Hazel acts and talks like any normal person would, but on the outside she is looked at differently. Hazel is constantly carrying around an oxygen tank with tubes running up into her nostrils. She can act as funny or as intelligent as she wants, she will never be looked at in the same way “healthy” people are. Readers understand how great of a person Hazel really is, but to outsiders she is either pitied or outcasted. Hazel, acknowledging she will