The Fault In Our Stars

 

The Fault in Our Stars is an award winning book about a girl named Hazel. She is a teenager who has cancer. She often talks about her favorite book An Imperial Affliction (also about a teenaged girl dying of cancer). Hazel is quite similar to the main character of this book (who is named Anna). Hazel often talks about how “life is just a side effect of dying,” and is mostly very dismal about life. One would expect that carelessness from a dying, cancer-diagnosed teen, but I think, secretly, Hazel really cares. I can tell this by the connection Hazel feels to Anna in An Imperial Affliction. She constantly talks about the book, and, although she never mentions feeling close to Anna, you can tell by the way she talks about the book and its characters that she does feel close to her. Most importantly, you can tell that she does care, mostly about the people around her.

                I can tell Hazel really cares about her family and what happens to them after she inevitably dies because she is so obsessed with figuring out what happens to Anna’s parents after she dies. An Imperial Affliction ends mid-sentence, presumably because Anna dies, so you never figure out what happens to her family and friends. Hazel goes all the way to the nether lands just to figure out what happens to Anna’s family. She claims she did this because she really like the book, but I think she made this effort because (since she connected with Anna so deeply) she thinks that figuring out what happens to Anna’s family will tell her what will happen to hers.

                She really desperately wants to not “hurt” anybody when she dies, so she distances herself from all her old friends (and newer ones). At one point she describes herself as a grenade and says that when she finally kicks the bucket she will explode and leave shrapnel in everybody she cares about and everybody who cares about her. She wants to know that they’ll be okay. Unlike most people, who want to be remembered, Hazel thinks that the more people you know when you die, the more casualties of your grenade there will be. I think this an interesting thought, but not entirely true. I believe that when you pass, people are glad to have known you, and yes, they will be sad, but it is part of human nature to miss people or things, without that we would be much more heartless and careless.