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John Green has made a career out of telling stories through an adolescent voice; his popularity with adolescent readers suggests that he is successful in his mimicry of that voice. In The Fault in Our Stars (2012), Green employs the first-person narration of Hazel Lancaster, an adolescent survivor of Stage 4 thyroid cancer, as well as her dialogue with other adolescent characters and with her parents. Hazel's story revolves around her interactions with the people whom she meets at a teen cancer support group, particularly a boy named Augustus Waters. Using a narrative centered upon this particular subgroup of adolescents, Green establishes a finite space within which to explore the ways that adolescents struggle against adult normativity1 to establish meaning and identity. This struggle relies upon Green's implied assertion that although adolescents should recognize and act on their keen awareness of the power of language as a means of understanding and interacting with the world, they are still unable to assert power over either language or adults. This recognition of adolescent struggle and its relationship to language in The Fault in Our Stars carries with it both educative and reflective value for an adolescent reader.
Green establishes Hazel's relationship with language in multiple places throughout the novel; her love for an obscure novel about an adolescent with cancer, An Imperial Affliction, is one of the primary sites for this relationship. A significant portion of Green's narrative is devoted to Hazel and Augustus's trip to Amsterdam to meet the novel's author, Peter Van Houten. Hazel is appalled when he turns out to be an alcoholic bully whose ravings are nearly nonsensical. Later, Van Houten reappears after Augustus's funeral; Hazel realizes then that despite his having written an entire novel, he still has not found the language that will help him understand the loss of his daughter. Language has failed Van Houten—or Van Houten has failed language. Hazel tells him, "You should go home. Sober up. Write another novel. Do the thing you're good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something" (287). For Hazel, language is vital to her own battle against the power structures of a world over which she otherwise has no control. For Hazel, Van...