Stories connect people in a magnitude unimaginable. A story can bring together two people who have gone through the same thing, it can stir emotions in people and it can make people aware of something the author is trying to put forth through a story.
‘The Fault in Our Stars’ is one novel that struck me in a way that I’d never be able to forget it for my lifetime. From the way that it describes the unhindered reality to the fact that sometimes even if you go through a lot, you survive life.
The plot shows us how two cancer survivors meet in a cancer survivors camp and acquaint each other and soon turn out to get closer. It shows how both Hazel and Augustus, tread through life with pain as a simple element that keeps their life going. The plot, though highly realistic, shows how children can take life and death as an easy and casual ordeal; from Isaac who lost his eyes to cancer, to Augustus who lost his girlfriend to cancer and also a prosthetic leg and Hazel who goes about her life with water in lungs, an oxygen cylinder tagging along with her everywhere she goes and a nubbin like tube going into her nose.
Thematically, the novel gives in a bucket full of life lessons that’s worth keeping. It shows us how necessary suffering is, for ‘without suffering, we wouldn’t know joy.’ It shows how small children go about sufferings in life and that isnt the age where sufferings are supposed to occur. It speaks, at one point, about the scars we leave on people once we die and that it matters. Hazel doesn’t want to get closer to Augustus for the reason that she knows she’ll die soon. Augustus on the other hand, shows us how no matter how much the distance is, between people, the intensity of affection doesn’t decrease. He says, in the end that he is proud to have left the scar on Hazel. The fear of oblivion also would be something I’d say that was a recurring theme. The main characters suffer pain and death unlike all young and healthy people do. It makes Hazel feel disheartened that she hasn’t achieved anything that’d as such make her to be remembered. Augustus always yearns to do something heroic before he dies. Even Van Houten, the author from the novel, had this urge to immortalize his dead daughter, that he wrote a novel to show what would’ve been of his daughter if she hadn’t died. Even then, in the end, he kills the character, showing how transient and unpredictable life can be.
The characters are what I would call true heroes who survived plague. They all go about their lives with so much of penance and yet, they’re so young to suffer so much. Hazel and Augustus’s parents, both knowing that their children’s life is a thin line between life and death, make so much of the moment. It’s so heartening to see how Hazel’s mother celebrates everyday with Hazel, seizing the opportunity to show how much she loves her.
Honestly, I was made to read the novel by my sister. I was pretty reluctant because of how astrological the title sounded. It is not much of a giveaway, but it’s a small line from Julius Caesar where Cassius says to Brutus about how “the fault isn’t in our stars, dear Brutus, but in ourselves that we are underlings.” A very hearty and morose, but a mind boggling vision towards life is what I got from a very thorough reading/analysis of the novel. Okay? Okay!
Everything And Anything 