The grenade metaphor captures her sense that she is going to “blow up” and she will cause awful and useless damage to anyone she is with.
But Hazel Grace moves out of the funk phase into “the grenade phase,” which, as you will readily imagine, is a lot more volatile. If you have even a little extra oxygen, it is fun to use it flirting with a boy you like and admire and who is flirting with you almost full time. The amazing thing is that he would use all the energy he has to live as fully as he can and, from the time he meets Hazel Grace, in Chapter 1, that means using energy to be with her.įinding herself attractive to a genuinely hot boy like Gus brings Hazel Grace out of the funk she is in when we meet her. But that’s not really the amazing thing about Augustus. He had to give up a leg to get rid of the cancer, he thinks, but now he is rid of it. He believes, mistakenly as it turns out, that his cancer is a part of his past. His relationship with Hazel has all the advantages of being a love story and we already know how to do those.Īugustus is, as I said, a “cancer kid” like Hazel Grace except he is unlike her in one very important respect: dying of cancer –or whatever he is doing-doesn’t seem to take all his time. The relationship with the parents is the more complicated one, so I am going to deal with Augustus first. Those two sets of relationships twine around each other like DNA and give palpable life to the narrative. The second is an extraordinary love affair with Augustus Waters, another cancer kid. They orbit Hazel’s illness like satellites. They are, as Hazel sees them, “parents of a cancer kid.” Not more not other.
If Hazel’s life is an expression of her illness, then her parents’ lives are an expression of the expression of Hazel’s illness. The first is that Hazel Grace’s parents are bound tightly to her cancer. The paths she follows in getting over it is what the book is really about. The cancer will do what it will do, but she needs to get over seeing herself as one of its side effects.
She sees herself mostly as one of the side effects of the cancer she has. Hazel Grace Lancaster, the protagonist, is probably dying of cancer. John Green has written a really good book about that dilemma. When you are dying of cancer, the question of what, really, is the point of living, becomes pressing.
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