"Absolutely Disgraceful"For a couple weeks we read this book called The Fault in our Stars by John Green, and its a story about a young girl named Hazel Grace-Lancaster, that has stage 4 thyroid cancer, and as a 16 year old girl shes going through the motions of trying to cope with her cancer and becoming to prepare her self for the inevitable, trying not to be a "grenade" to her family and friends, but as she goes to her support group sessions, she meets a new guy who is a friend of her half blind friend, and his name was Augustus, Augustus waters, a very optimistic and upbeat personality kind of guy, and as they meet, they immediately fall in love with each other, and going on throughout the book is about these too and the love and relationship between two teenagers going through a time of hardship.
By the end of this book, Mr. Patton issued an assignment for us to write an essay about this book, but the assignment was to write about a certain or specific prompt in which we had the pleasure to choose from several different prompts, where we had to choose a prompt on whether it was abou a specific piece of literature from the book, or going into the science of Hazels disease, or even writing a letter to her, recommending she came to our school, but in which case, we wrote these prompts to try and develope a better understanding of the book and what its saying, for instance, for my prompt i had to write an essay on a piece of literature in the book that John Green used, whether it was a poem, a song, or a qoute, from a famous author, and i had to investigate into the reasoning behind why John Green would use this qoute for this specific part of the book and what messege we was trying to convey with it. I came across a lot of interesting information in which you could see below.
12/4/13
Reece Freeman
TFIOS Essay
“Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice?”
-Virginia Woolf
In John Green's book The Fault In Our Stars, Green is able to appeal to his readers in a way to make the reader think critically as he reads the book. The reader is also left to wonder why Green would choose to reference poems or pieces of literature in such a way to convey his message. I was interested by one of the poems referenced in the book, which occurs when Hazel recites to Gus as he’s in a gas station dying of an infected G-tube. Hazel recites a poem by William Carlos Williams called “The Red Wheelbarrow,” and by doing this, it leaves the reader wondering why it was only at this time she remembers specifically this poem, but no other poem.
John Green has a way of showing that Hazel is trying to mentally heal Augustus with a poem. “The Augustus Waters of the crooked smile......was gone, replaced by this desperate humiliated creature.” (Pg, 246)(Hazel Grace) Augustus is in a vulnerable moment in time right now because he's faced with the facts of his own being, like a reality check which also brings out the other side of his persona. Gus is in a vulnerable state in his car, responding to Hazel saying, “I hate myself I hate myself..............I hate it I hate it I hate it just let me f**king die.” (Pg, 245)(Augustus Waters) This is one of the examples of how Augustus shows how he has become a different and more angry person, after he has remained so upbeat for so long. Hazel calls an ambulance to the gas station. After Hazel recites a poem to Gus, this is how Gus responds, “Half conscious, he glanced over at me and mumbled, ‘And you say you don't write poetry’.” (Pg, 247)(Augustus Waters) This was a significant moment, because after Hazel had recited that poem, Augustus's mood had changed as if she had healed a little conflict in his brain.
John Green also makes the correlation that because Augustus is injured she uses the poem of a doctor and thats also one of the reasons she remembers. “William was a doctor. It seemed to me like a doctor's poem.”(Pg, 247)(Hazel Grace) I had a feeling maybe she felt that a poem by a doctor would make him feel better. Hazel inspects Gus’s G-tube in his car at the gas station to investigate what might be causing him pain “Inspect the place above his belly button.... the skin of the abdomen was warm and bright red.”(Pg, 244)(Hazel Grace) This justifies the fact that Gus was in great pain. Theres also a segment where it says in the poem of William Carlos Williams, “.....glazed in water...”(Pg, 247)(Hazel Grace). I thought this correlated with Augustus because, it takes about the “red wheelbarrow”, which in my opinion represented Augustus, and “glazed in water”, which represented covered in his vomit, so i thought it was interesting how that was described in the book.
I see that their was some correlation that John Green tried to use between the two main characters and the red wheelbarrow and the chickens. “so much depends upon, a red wheelbarrow...... besides the white chickens.” (Pg, 246 - 247)(Hazel Grace) The red wheelbarrow meaning Augustus and the chickens meaning Hazel and possibly the ambulance coming too. Hazel has just arrived to the gas station and sees Augustus in his car horrified by the imagine of his suffering “i pulled up next to his. I opened the door............... Augustus sat in the driver’s seat, covered in his own vomit, his hands pressed to his belly where his G-tube went in.” (Pg. 244)(Hazel Grace) Augustus was the wheelbarrow because it seemed at the time that Hazel was was depending on him to stay alive. Hazel finished her poem but continues on with a continuation of her last poem into something else she started to make up “And so much depends, I told augustus, upon a blue sky cut open..............so much depends on the observer of the universe.” (Pg, 247)(Hazel Grace) After the poem i think she realizes then that the poem she remembered was quite possibly related to their situation so she went off into her own poem about who she's depending on.
Why did John Green choose this specific poem for this particular part in the book? he includes poems or references them to express his feelings using these poems throughout the whole book by many famous poets, authors, and writers to express feelings of life, and love, death, and despair, and of ourselves of course. John Green places poems all throughout his book and i intend to find out why, for what i believe is John Green uses these as guidelines to express his opinion. The poem was written by a doctor, the poem helps heal a bit of conflict in Gus’s head, and the wheelbarrow represents Gus, while the chickens represent Hazel. And what i think a last thought is also interesting to think about is that, did john green write a lot of this book to not only express the story of a struggling teenager, but also maybe to make the reader understand poems in a much more broad perspective.