Augustus is the worst, but maybe I'm just jealous

Peter Van Houten is the most universally hated character in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. Personally, I find Van Houten so clearly crafted for hatred that I can’t bite. He is a lie that is so clearly untrue you couldn’t possibly be offended by it. The true source of my most powerful disapproval falls on Augustus Waters’ character. Augustus is just as pretentious and selfish as Van Houten, but with an added element of unsettlingly calculated behavior.

Augustus’s dialogue is so needlessly pretentious I often caught myself rolling my eyes. Turning to a random page here and selecting a random Augustus quote: “Do you realize how rare it is to come across a hot girl who creates an adjectival version of the word pedophile? You are so busy being you that you have no idea how utterly unprecedented you are” (123). The sentence structure is needlessly complex with equally needless words peppered in. His practiced soliloquy at the Skeleton Sculpture was no more excessive than the above quote, even if it did have more literary references. Van Houten could have given a cynical version of the same speech and no reader would’ve blinked. Augustus’s dialogue is just one way his character is unsettlingly calculated.

All of Augustus’s behaviors seem perfectly calculated to be edgy and interesting. It’s like he watched a Dos Equis commercial and felt inspired to live his life as “the most interesting man in the world.” The unlit cigarettes are the greatest foul. No one takes pleasure in constantly dangling something from their mouth for the pure pleasure of a metaphor. It seems more like a loud cry for attention, especially when he started nibbling on one during the flight to Amsterdam. No self-conscious human being would pull out a cigarette on a plane. We all had the same impulse as children, but we got it out of our system by pretending pretzel sticks were cigarettes.

I can’t shake the suspicion Augustus was emotionally abusing Hazel, the only character in the book I really liked. I was initially happy with the direction of the novel. Hazel deserves a smoke show boyfriend, but not one who keeps the minor secret of being even more terminally ill than she is. Augustus admits that he pretended to be healthy to win her over, and accuses her of doing the same if she were in his position. Even though Hazel loved him and the time she spent they spent together, his death still crushed her. Hazel foresaw that exact same scenario playing out on opposite sides of the table and took steps to protect Augustus. And yet in his final letter he simply says ‘yeah, I hope she is happy with her decision to be heart broken by me. I know I am’ Hazel deserves better. She should’ve dated Isaac.

I blame most of my problems with Gus on John Green. Green had an objective with Gus’s character, and I suppose Gus is the nearest realization he could muster. Perhaps Gus was the realization of the self Green daydreamed about in high school, but with one added hamartia in the form of a cancerous body that allowed him to charm most readers. Outside of his terminal illness and missing leg, Gus is a perfect human being, and no one likes a perfect human being of the same sex. Admittedly, my old “boy perfect” high school jealousy may be preventing me from being swept up in his incessantly touted charisma. Despite his hotness, Hazel deserved better.