The Fault in Our Stars
WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD
The following is my personal reflection, not a book review.
The characters in The Fault In Our Stars are young, but the questions they face are not. Augustus and Hazel respond to illness (cancer), love, and death in ways that feel deeply human, sometimes mature, sometimes childish, often contradictory.
Augustus and Hazel approach life very differently. Augustus wants to matter, to be remembered, to leave something behind. Hazel is afraid of hurting the people she loves, of being a “grenade” whose death will cause pain. The book never tells us which way of thinking is correct. It allows both to exist, without judgment.
When Gus (Augustus) becomes sick, the story becomes especially painful to read. Watching him decline hurts because of who he was before: confident, charming, full of energy. One of the most heartbreaking scenes is when he calls Hazel late at night after getting stranded at a gas station. He had gone out to buy cigarettes (not because he smoked, but because he used them as a metaphor). Gus is scared, humiliated, and alone, and Hazel is the only person he can call.
What breaks the heart even more is Gus’s reaction to Hazel seeing him like this. He wanted so badly to remain the charming boy in her eyes. He wanted to be strong, impressive, unforgettable. Instead, she sees him at his weakest, dependent, sick, unable to control his own body. His breakdown in that moment is not about pride. It is about vulnerability, and the fear of being loved when you feel unlovable.
Their love is not perfect or evenly balanced. Augustus loves in grand gestures, with careful words and deliberate romance. Hazel loves more quietly, more cautiously. Still, their love becomes real precisely because it is messy. Later, in his last (and only) letter to Van Houten, Augustus laments that by letting Hazel love him, he has left her with a scar, knowing that he will die and leave her only with his memory.
The novel does not answer whether love that causes pain is worth it. Is it kinder to protect others from pain, or to risk hurting them by loving deeply? It does not try to comfort us with certainty.
After Augustus’s death, one of the most moving moments is Hazel’s desire to talk about Augustus’s death to Augustus himself, in the third space they had created together. She wants to explain his passing to him, to share it with the one person who should understand. This moment captures grief with painful honesty, the instinct to reach out to one’s loved ones even when they are gone. It made me cry, and it stayed with me long after I closed the book.
This is not a story where one person saves the other. Hazel and Augustus give each other companionship, warmth, and solace, not answers. Augustus is not a perfect figure written only to make Hazel’s life meaningful. He is troubled, afraid that his life and death might not matter. By the end, he seems to realize that meaning can also exist in being present, in observing, and in being deeply loved by one person.
The book offers no clear morals or takeaways about oblivion, love, or suffering. It does not tell us how to live or how to die. What it offers instead is something quieter and more honest: two people choosing to love each other, knowing that it will end, and choosing it anyway.