The Fault in Our Stars

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green is about two teenagers with cancer, Hazel Grace Lancaster, and Augustus Waters. The novel is written from the perspective of Hazel. She is a 16-year-old girl living with terminal lung cancer. In a support group her mother forced her to go to, she meets Augustus, a 17-year-old boy with osteosarcoma. The story follows their relationship, and how they fall in love.

In the novel, Green has a lot of symbolism. One symbol he uses is cigarettes. Augustus does not smoke, but he put cigarettes in his mouth. However, he doesn’t light them. “It’s a metaphor, see: You put the killing thing right between your teeth, but you don’t give it the power to do its killing”, says Augustus. When lit, cigarettes can cause many types of cancer. However, the difference between smoking and cancer is that people can choose to smoke; people cannot choose to have cancer. Augustus feels powerful when he puts cigarettes in his mouth because it represents him having control over what can destroy him. When he gets nervous, he puts cigarettes in his mouth, like when Hazel turned him down. The unlit cigarettes reassure him that he still has power over what can hurt him, even when he feels hurt and powerless.

Another example of symbolism in The Fault in Our Stars is the ending of Hazel’s favorite book, An Imperial Affliction; it ends midsentence. Hazel connects with the main character, Anna, because they both have cancer, and they deal with their own problems in similar ways. In AIA, Anna’s mom gets engaged to a Dutch man, who sells tulips, who Anna believes is a con man. The story ends midsentence because Anna dies or is too ill to write, and Hazel understands this, but she connects to Anna in so many ways, that when the story ends midsentence, Hazel gets very frustrated and has many questions about what happens to other characters in the book. Subconsciously, Hazel’s questions about what happens to everyone else in AIA, represent the questions Hazel has about what will happen to her family and loved ones when she thinks she will die. She desperately wants to know how AIA ends, so she will know how her story ends.

The symbols in the book represent people in general. For example, most people are afraid of death, and having something that they know they have control over whether or not it will kill them is reassuring. Also, people make such close connections to things, and people. People get attached to things, and when they have to let go, it hurts a lot. This resembles Hazel, and how she got so attached to Anna, so much, that she feels as though they are almost the same person in many ways. In several other ways, Augustus and Hazel represent human beings, and their vulnerability, ignorance, and confusion in finding who they are in this world, and what they want to be remember for. This is one of the many ways that John Green makes The Fault in Our Stars such a beautiful and sentimental book.