Reading John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars"

As the tide washed in, the Dutch Tulip Man faced the Ocean: 
'Conjoiner rejoinder poisoner concealer revelator. Look at it, rising up and rising down, taking everything with it.' 

     'What’s that?' Anna asked. 

     'Water,' the Dutchman said. 'Well, and time.'

           -Peter Van Houten, An Imperial Affliction

This epigraph hooked me immediately. John Green, following in the footsteps of F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," decided to begin his novel with a quote from a fictional text. By fictional I mean, "An Imperial Affliction" does not exist. Well, it does, though .... inside "The Fault in Our Stars." Hooked yet?

I read John Green's "The Fault in Our Stars" (TFiOS) a few weeks ago, and I must say, I can't stop thinking about this book. I had started "The Hunger Games" (along with a bazillion other people) and was instantly horrified by the concept. I was not horrified by the commentary offered by the novel--I was horrified by the obsession with the violence depicted in the novels. I was horrified by the truth it suggests about modern culture. "The Hunger Games" ... as a film ... is simply ironic for me. The book is a critique on our desire to to bathe in blood and violence, yet the film acts out the book in a way that abandons the commentary and simply performs, leaving us to become, once again, members of an audience, cheering for those in the arena. (More on this thinking in a future post.)

Back to TFiOS. I can't stop thinking about Hazel and her profound, intellectual approaches to her situation. Hazel, 16, the novel's narrator, is fighting and slowly losing her battle with cancer. As a narrator, Hazel has the ability to transfer her fears to the reader. She reminds me of Hamlet in many ways. There are speeches within the text that echo the existential soliloquies of Hamlet. However, I find Hazel far braver than the Dark Prince of Denmark. Hazel desperately wants to live her life, to explore the beauty of a world with boundless experiences, even though she is deeply aware of her own finite amount of time here to explore those experiences. 


“There will come a time when all of us are dead. All of us. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything. There will be no one left to remember Aristotle or Cleopatra, let alone you. Everything that we did and built and wrote and thought and discovered will be forgotten and all of this will have been for naught. Maybe that time is coming soon and maybe it is millions of years away, but even if we survive the collapse of our sun, we will not survive forever. There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it. God knows that’s what everyone else does.” 

In allusion to Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar," Green adapts his title from lines delivered by Cassius to Brutus, "Men at some time are masters of their fates: / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings" (I.ii). I guess the question is, What happens when we are absolutely, profoundly, NOT masters of our own fate?


I can't stand spoilers ... and I do not want to ruin a great book, but I can say, there is a love story here. The story of Hazel and Gus set against the stark reality of cancer moves me. This book has me re-examining my own relationships, my perspectives on life and death, and the realities faced by young people every day. 

Here is John Green reading the first chapter. 






I look forward to your comments.