The honest narration of Green’s TFiOS brings about less sterilized and more individualized descriptions of both Hazel’s own illness and of Gus’s, details the film version significantly lacks.

The film, however, eliminates much of this honesty, and this post will focus on the film’s ironic (and unfortunate) embodiment of Hazel’s comment that “Illness repulses,” as the film, in many ways, makes countless efforts to not “repulse” its audience. Throughout Green’s TFiOS, readers are frequently privy to Hazel’s blunt honesty: her distaste for cancer “battle” metaphors, her critique of typical cancer narratives that paint the cancer patient as someone who is always strong and always courageous, and her reluctance to find “meaning” in her own illness (she frequently refers to her cancer as a “side effect,” the result of “relentless mutation that made the diversity of life on earth possible” (49)). Hazel’s comment on illness, on her curiosity about Gus’s cancer-stricken body, becomes one of many intimately honest moments we receive through her narration. “Illness repulses,” reflects Hazel Grace, the first-person narrator of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, as she shares with her readers the morbid curiosity she has about her new friend (and soon-to-be love interest) Augustus Waters’ fake leg (Green 36).

“Illness Repulses”: How ‘The Fault in Our Stars’ film erases the book’s candid narration of illness

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