Side Effects Of The Evolutionary Process and Failed Experiments in Mutation John Green’s The Fault In Our Stars is not a very ambitious book. It only seeks to explore the meaning of life and death. Throughout the book, Green presents contrasting views about the meaning of life (and death). On one hand, Green explores various human emotions involving the idea of wanting to keep alive someone whose death is inevitable; but Green also presents the perspective that emotions are just a side effect of evolution.
The more sentimental belief that leads to emotional feelings of pity and sadness toward cancer-ridden teenagers and the deceased is presented throughout the book. 17 year-old Hazel Lancaster’s mother will do anything to keep her terminally ill daughter alive. At one point, while she is in the ICU, Hazel overhears her mom say something that signifies a change in her mother’s view towards Hazel: 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.
(117).Hazel’s mom’s emotions are so invested in her that she stops being a mom and tries to be a friend. Similarly, Augustus, a guy Hazel meets in a support group who ultimately becomes her boyfriend, often expresses how important it is to him to leave a mark before dying. In a letter that he wrote near the time of his death, he is still thinking about this: Almost everyone is obsessed with leaving a mark upon the world.
Bequeathing a legacy. Outlasting death. We all want to be remembered. I do, too. That’s what bothers me most, is being another unremembered casualty in the ancient and inglorious war against disease.
(310).Wanting to leave a legacy shows a concern about self-image after one’s own life has ended. The concept of one’s legacy is also dealt with in the book’s discussion of funerals. Everyone acts like they knew the deceased and sums up all of the good a person did in their life and tries to forget the bad.
Hazel, who is also facing death, feels differently, but decides to conform and give a stirring eulogy. Hazel notes the contradiction after giving her eulogy: “Funerals, I had decided, are for the living” (273). All of these situations show the sentimental, emotional view that peoples’ feelings distinguish them from other forms of life on Earth.In other parts of the book, Green presents a more scientific view primarily through Hazel, the author of her favorite book, and sometimes Augustus. When Augustus and Hazel go to visit their favorite author in Europe as a part of Augustus’ “wish” (a cancer perk,) Peter Van Houten is not the kind of person that they were expecting. When they go to his house to talk about the book, he tries to offend Hazel by saying whatever he can think of: “You are a side effect of an evolutionary process that cares little for individual lives.
You are a failed experiment in mutation” (192). Hazel already knows this. Her view of life is very pessimistic. She fully understands that humans are on Earth for evolutionary purposes only. Emotions aside, humans are slightly advanced creatures on our planet. Near the end of the book after Augustus dies, Hazel comments on Augustus’ Facebook wall after seeing what other people have written: We live in a universe devoted to the creation, and eradication, of awareness.
Augustus Waters did not die after a lengthy battle with cancer.He died after a lengthy battle with human consciousness, a victim—as you will be—of the universe’s need to make and unmake all that is possible. (266). Hazel doesn’t look at cancer as a horrible disease, she looks at is as another way for humans to die.
This scientific philosophy is most dramatically shown when Augustus expresses a rare perspective of cancer during a conversation with Hazel: “Even cancer isn’t a bad guy really: Cancer just wants to be alive” (246). This morally equivalent view is rarely thought of in a society that wears pink in October to support the eradication of caner.Cancer is something that is looked at as a negative thing by humans, but eating animals is not. Cancer preys on humans the same way that humans prey on animals.
It’s the circle of life. The contrasting views of the meaning of life in The Fault In Our Stars run throughout the book. The characters’ cancer provides the author with the opportunity to explore what it means to live both from and emotional and a scientific perspective. While humans have developed to the point that they can react emotionally rather than just living to reproduce, Green reminds us that we are still subject to the laws of nature.
