The Fault in Our Stars 1

The Fault in Our Stars is a heartwarming but also heartbreaking novel that makes you rethink ways of living. It's about two cancer patients that meet in a support group that bring them together and they end up falling in love. Since both of the main characters, Hazel and Augustus, have terminal cancer, a big theme in the book is death. Another big theme in the book is love.
             

Although both teenagers are suffering from illnesses, they have different outlooks on death. Augustus  fears oblivion. He feels as if his life would only matter if he lived or died for something. Hazel strongly disagrees with this idea.

"If you don't live a life in service of a greater good, you've gotta at least die a death in service of a greater good, you know? And I fear that I won't get either a life or a death that means anything" (page 168).

When Gus says this Hazel gets mad and upset because she feels like her being in his life and loving him isn't enough to satisfy him. Hazel on the other hand, just wants to know that her relations with her loved ones will carry on even after her death. In the hospital in her younger years as a girl, she had almost died in the ICU(intensive care unit) and her mom kept telling her it was okay to let go and right when she was about to she overheard her mom say "I'm not going to be a mother anymore." This broke her heart and that's what she has been thinking about ever since.

The other theme of love in the book is spread throughout the whole thing. A scene in the story that stuck out to me is when Gus dies, we hear Hazel's thoughts. She explains when you go to the ER they tell you to rate your pain on a scale if 1-10. One day she when she was in the ER, it was her worst day and she rated her pain a 9. The nurse told her she was a fighter because she called a 10 a 9.

"But that wasn't quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my ten. And here it was," she explained (page 263).This shows that no pain could ever be worse than losing her love forever.