Hazel Grace Lancaster's Profile:
Parents: Mr. & Mrs. Lancaster Siblings: None Home: Indiana, USA Health: diagnosed with Stage 4 Thyroid cancer with metastasis forming in her lungs, but has managed to live with her disease owing to doses of an experimental drug called Phalanxifor. |
The Fault in Our Stars Is written through Hazel's Perspective. We learn a lot about her character through her thoughts, actions and words.
Hazel is a strong, sarcastic, passionate and intelligent individual. She goes through everyday carrying her oxygen tank around and is constantly smiling. Hazel Grace Lancaster describes her life as a grenade. “I'm a grenade and at some point I'm going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?” (Green, 99) Hazel Grace feels like a grenade - a ticking bomb - that can go off any moment because she thinks that she'll be this explosion that's going to affect everyone around her. Even when Hazel meets Augustus Waters, she won’t overstep the friendship line. When she blows up she wants to minimize the casualties after her death. Hazel argues with her mother as much as any other teenager - though in her case its about whether or not she's depressed. Her mother is convinced she is depressed, which Hazel doesn’t doubt, but unlike her mother she knows her depression isn’t a side effect of her cancer. It’s a side effect of dying as she states many times in the novel. Hazel idolizes the author of An Imperial Affliction, (a book that she reads over and over again, a book that she is very passionate about and can relate to), Peter Van Houten, but he crushes her dreams when she spends Augustus's one wish to go to Amsterdam. She's been waiting for this moment to meet her favourite author and learn what happens after the book ends. "I thought I might throw up" (Green, 181) When her dreams are shattered, she feels sick. She thought her idol was going to be enthusiastic and everything she thought he would be, but instead he was the exact opposite. Hazel is a girl like any other, she wants to live a normal life - like a normal teenager. But she has just one problem - she has cancer. She is dying. |