Humor and Relationships

In Marilyn Chandler McEntyre’s written article, Friends in Need: Illness and Friendship in Adolescent Fiction, the author goes into detail about how there are so many different genres of young adult novels that lead into specific situations regarding illnesses, love, loss, and emotional themes that many young adults can relate to. McEntyre touches on the fact that the main characters of many of these novels act as either the care giver or are the patient themselves dealing with an illness or loss, “The best of such characters serve to show us the many faces of fidelity…In some of them the Protagonist is the patient; in some, the one who finds him- or herself in a new role as caregiver form which unsuspected satisfactions emerge (McEntyre).” With the main characters playing the role of the person suffering and dealing with an emotional situation it is how these characters are portrayed that is the theme among these novels, “The value of these books lies largely in their unsentimental development of character and situation. The ways humor emerges in unexpected (and sometimes apparently inappropriate) places, and the way intergenerational relationships, both easy and hard, appear to be a necessary matrix for the development of youthful friendship (McEntyre).” This theme easily relates back to The Fault in Our Stars by John Green by the way Green portrays Hazel and Gus’s sarcastic behavior in the novel. The way Hazel is introduced into the book suggests that she is sarcastic and casual about her condition and doesn’t let cancer overpower her, “Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death (Green 3).” It is important that she be introduced as this because it gives her character a more lively personality rather than a cancer patient that has been overcome by her condition. The humor and relationship that Hazel and Gus share in The Fault in Our Stars is essential to maintain the “youthful friendship” in the book (McEntyre). Their humor can be very unexpected at points and tends to be very sarcastic, but because of that it makes the reader feel more connected to their strong relationship which is an important theme throughout young adult novels. The readers want to be connected and in these genres of books it is important to experience unexpected relationships and humor that bring these characters together and lets the reader relate to the book.

Green, John. The Fault in Our Stars. N.p.: Penguin Books, n.d.

McEntyre, Marilyn Chandler. “Friends in Need: Illness and Friendship in
Adolescent Fiction.” Literature and Medicine, 132-45. Accessed September
22, 2014. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/literature_and_medicine/v021/
21.1mcentyre.html.