Quick Write: Care (Grenade)

In the book, Hazel Grace portrays herself as a grenade. A grenade waiting to explode and hurt everyone around her. The reader finds this out in a dinner scene with Hazel’s parents when she says, “I’m like a grenade, mom. I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the casualties, okay?” (99). This explains why she pushes Augustus away at the beginning- she doesn’t want to hurt him, She was saying that she is going to die and she wants to stay away from people so they don’t end up being hurt. However, just before telling her parents she was a grenade, she was texting Augustus. He explained that he was playing a video game and he didn’t have enough time to remove a grenade from a school building, so he jumped on top of the grenade to save the all the children’s lives. His team members were angry and frustrated because he died, but he saved all the children’s lives. At the end of the book, Augustus passes away; however, Hazel does not. She was the grenade, and he took the blow of her grenade. Hazel thinks her pin has been pulled and it is only a matter of time before she explodes. This is a metaphor for when she gets really sick and dies. Other people will feel intense stress and get hurt. Hazel wants to hide away to minimize the damage she will cause. In the beginning, Hazel doesn’t want to get close to Augustus, because she was afraid he is going to be shattered when she dies. But towards the ending, hazel finds out it doesn’t matter if you die in the middle of a relationship, it’s about the moments you spend together.

Word count: 297