The Fault In Our Stars

I am usually at a loss when it comes to speaking about literature. When it comes to poetry or prose, there are two outcomes: it absolutely bores me to death and I trudge through it in order to say I finish it, or I read with intensity until my eyes are red rimmed and my fingers numb from writing notes between the margins.

I had a three hour gap today between classes at school and finally purchased "The Fault In Our Stars" by John Green the night before. My thoughts were to get a good chunk of reading done and finish it when I got home today. However, within those three hours I finished the book.

Although it did come out in January, I am glad I didn't purchase and read it until now. I don't think it would have moved me the same way.

Hazel's mind is filled with anecdotes and memorizations of long-dead writers of the past, and writers who truly move me.

At one point, she finds her companion at a pinnacle point of hopelessness and dying. While waiting for the ambulance to arrive, she speaks to him "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams.

So much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

besides the white
chickens.

When reading this portion of the novel, I almost burst to tears sitting in an uncomfortable library chair. Not so much of the situation of the novel, but the situation I am in now, and the situation in which I first read Williams. I first saw and read his works on the morning after a friend's death, and after that class last spring I broke down in front of my professor as I explained to her the situation. Since then, I have always associated Williams with a sense of loss, and here in the novel Hazel was dealing with a slow realization that some things cannot be lived through.

The novel is rife with other things as well, such as "Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, even Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. All things that I am invested in and have meaning to my life, whether literary or my disagreements with psychology.


This post really must have no significance to anyone who so dares to read my ramblings, but it means something to me. Ever since I could read, my life has been invested in the words of others. It is through reading that I have been able to discover who I am as a person, the things that matter most to me, and philosophies on life. Without literature, without books, I would cease to exist as a person. My life would be lived as a soulless robot, mechanically drifting through the phases of life with an emotionless nature.