The Fault in Our Stars

Topic: Hazel and Gus change significantly over the course of the novel. What causes these changes? What conflicts do they experience and how do they overcome those conflicts?

Everything change at times; the weather change; our environment change; even humans change during different times in our lives. One of the greatest causes of a persons change is that the conditions of life change which make one adapt oneselves in order to be able to keep on living. A change of life’s conditions can both be positive and negative and it can for example be that you get a new friend, you lose someone och something you love or that you get terminally ill. You could say that whenever life change, so do you.

This essay is based on the novel The fault in our stars, written by the english author John Green. The novel is about a sixteen year old girl called Hazel Grace Lancaster and a seventeen year old boy called Augustus Waters who falls in love with each other. Augustus lost one of his legs to cancer a couple of years ago and Hazel suffers from Thyroid cancer with metastasis forming in her lungs. In the essay I am going to analyse how Grace and Augustus change over the course of the novel and what might be the causes of these changes.

In the beginning of the book, you get introduced to Hazel Grace Lancaster, a sixteen year old girl who suffers from cancer and spend most of her time in her bed reading a book or watching tv. It is also written that her mother think that she is depressed. After this first impression Hazel might does not seem like a merry person but you soon get to see another side of her. Even though everybody around her feel sorry for her for having cancer and she is always the one who needs to take care of she do not pity her self. She is very open with her cancer and she do not talk about it in a self-pitying way but with a great dose of humor. An example of this is to find at page 24 and says: “I didn't tell him that the diagnosis came three months after I got my first period. Like: Congratulations! You're a woman. Now die.” (Green, 2012)

Hazel does not have any goals in her life, except of causing her parents as little sorrow as possible, and this is probably one of the biggest changes that happens in her life when she meet Augustus. You could tell this from reading the first sentence of the book; “ […] I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and develop quite a bit of my abundant free time to think about death.” When she first meet him, he immediately catches her interest in a way that Hazel never thought any boy would do. He brings a new meaning into her life and her whole life change; new things suddenly becomes important to her, she experience things that she would not normally have experienced and she realise that just because she is dying does not mean that she only bring sorrow into the lives of her loved ones.

Augustus also change during the course of the novel. You do not get to meet him before his and Hazels meeting but you could tell from reading about him that he is the one in his family that need to be taken care of. This is one of his biggest changes in the book, because when he is with Hazel he is no longer the weak one but the strong one to take care of Hazel.

When Augustus becomes ill, his and Hazels roles are reversed. Suddenly Hazel is the physically strongest one and Augustus is the weak one. During the time when Augustus is ill Hazel spends most of her time at his place taking care of him. Hazel grows more mature than ever while Augustus is beginning to realise that he is not able to leave such a mark as he says he wish at page 310-311: “Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world. […] We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against d...