The Fault In Our Stars: A Morphine Drip
“What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip?” (Greene) The fault in our stars is a novel written by John Greene about Hazel a teenage girl with cancer who meets the love of her life, Augustus, in a support group. In an attempt to do something special for hazel Augustus writes a letter to her favorite author, and the author responds saying “What should a story seek to emulate, Augustus? A ringing alarm? A call to arms? A morphine drip?” (Greene). This quote made me think. The Fault In Our Stars seeks to emulate a morphine drip for most teenage readers because it gives us hope that we can find the love of our lives at such a young age, gives a sense of consolation when it comes to dying, and that we can defeat our own odds.
The love between Augustus and Hazel gives teen readers a sense of hope that they could also find love at such a young age. When Augustus writes a letter to Hazel’s favorite author Van Houten he explains his love for Hazel, he writes: “What else? She is so beautiful. You don’t get tired of looking at her. You never worry if she is smarter than you: You know she is. She is funny without ever being mean. I love her. I am so lucky to love her, Van Houten. You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers.” This is a morphine drip for female readers because they wish that someone could love them the way that Augustus loves Hazel. In a rare situation Augustus asks Hazel to write a eulogy for him, In her eulogy she says “My name is Hazel. Augustus Waters was the great star-crossed love of my life. Ours was an epic love story, and I won't be able to get more than a sentence into it without disappearing into a puddle of tears. Gus knew. Gus knows. I will not tell you our love story, because-like all real love stories-it will die with us, as it should. I'd hoped that he'd be eulogizing me, because there's no one I'd rather have..." Hazel is very heartbroken to think about losing Augustus, she talks about how beautiful and epic their love story was. “But, Gus, my love, I cannot tell you how thankful I am for our little infinity. I wouldn’t trade it for the world. You gave me a forever within the numbered days, and I’m grateful.” Augustus and Hazel were both very aware that they would not live forever, but they promised to love each other always.
Hazel and Augustus show readers that you can defeat your own odds. When Hazel has to go to a support groups she talks about her struggles with cancer “There was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in and you figure that’s one in five. so you look around and think, as any healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.” This is important because Haxel touches on the kind of odds that she has to live with because of her cancer. Hazel talks about the odds of her surviving her cancer, She was once very sick and her parents and doctors didn’t think that they would survive “Mom sobbed something into Dad's chest that I wish I hadn't heard, and that I hope she never finds out that I did hear. She said, ‘I won't be a mom anymore.’ It gutted me pretty badly.” That night everyone thought that Hazel was probably going to die but she survived. Hazel and Augustus take a trip to Amsterdam and they tour the Anne Frank house “looking up at him, thinking that you cannot kiss anyone in the Anne Frank House, and then thinking that Anne Frank, after all, kissed someone in the Anne Frank House, and that she would probably like nothing more than for her home to have become a place where the young and irreparably broken sink into love.” Augustus and Hazel can compare their own lives to Anne Franks. She also beat her own odds by surviving as long as she did.
The Fault In Our Stars gives us a little consolation on our own death. Hazel tries to sell a childhood swingset that she has in her backyard, so it can have a new home. In her ad she writes “One swing set, well worn but structurally sound, seeks new home. Make memories with your kid or kids so that someday he or she or they will look into the backyard and feel the ache of sentimentality as desperately as I did this afternoon. It's all fragile and fleeting, dear reader, but with this swing set, your child(ren) will be introduced to the ups and downs of human life gently and safely, and may also learn the most important lesson of all: No matter how hard you kick, no matter how high you get, you can't go all the way around.” Hazel states in the ad that she compares the swing set to her own life. No matter how hard you try or how great your life is, we all die eventually. In Augustus letter he also says “People will say it's sad that she leaves a lesser scar, that fewer remember her, that she was loved deeply but not widely. But it's not sad, Van Houten. It's triumphant. It's heroic. Isn't that the real heroism? Like the doctors say: First, do no harm.” many people fear dying and not being remembered. Augustus and Hazel both had this fear. Hazel talks about the fear of oblivion with Augustus “There was time before organisms experienced consciousness, and there will be time after. And if the inevitability of human oblivion worries you, I encourage you to ignore it.” Augustus had a fear of oblivion, throughout the book he learned to let go of this fear.
The Fault In Our Stars seeks to emulate a morphine drip for most teenage readers because it gives us hope that we can find the love of our lives at such a young age, gives a sense of consolation when it comes to dying, and that we can defeat our own odds.The Fault in our stars is a morphine drips story because it makes us feel better about what could happen in our own lives.