The Fault in Our Stars

From the very first, Hazel is sharply critical of the prayers, stories, aphorisms, and tropes that dominate discussions of cancer, and especially kids with cancer, from the mantras of the Support Group (“we promise to Live Our Best Life Today”) to the “Encouragements” at Augustus’s house (“Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy?”). These platitudes and clichés, and their collective accretion into an ideology of heroic suffering, don’t only mask and ignore the unbearable pain—both emotional and physical—of cancer, they try to transform its essential, unjust malignancy into something redemptive and noble. Hazel rejects these conventions out of hand, and through her, the novel does, too, showing Augustus racked with humiliating, abject pain and showing the power of grief to destroy someone like Van Houten, even as it transforms Hazel into a more compassionate person. The Fault in Our Stars refuses the easy, reassuring path of presenting cancer as a blessing in disguise rather than what it really is: a horrible disease.