When Augustus said that he wanted to attend his own funeral, he asked Hazel to write him an eulogy. What’s your opinion of Hazel’s words?
I really liked it, because her eulogy served to offer Augustus some comfort and validation about how much he meant to her. It served to prove him that he wouldn't be forgotten by her, since he had left his mark, such as he wanted to do.
Why do you think John Green has chosen Augustus to die considering “he was apparently” the healthiest of three friends?
I believe he does it because he wants us to understand that life is like that. It doesn't matter if you are healthy or if you are very sick, we can't estimate when are we going to die nor we can decide when we are finally going to.
Also, another character that could have died is Hazel, but if Hazel died Gus would have another dead girlfriend, and that would be horrible for him.
John Green devotes the rest of his work expressing what’s like when your soul mate, your most beloved person, passes away; how emptiness, anger, and rejection invade us...
Find examples of those feelings in Hazel:
Example: “..., which was the saddest thing. The only person I really wanted to talk to about Augustus’s death was Augustus Waters.” Hazel (chapter 21: page 63)
-“...the kind of love Augustus and I share could never last. So dawn goes down to day, the poet wrote. Nothing gold can stay.”
"...when I grabbed the phone from the bedside table and saw Gus’s Mom on the caller ID, everything inside of me collapsed. She was just crying on the other end of the line, and she told me she was sorry, and I said I was sorry too..."
"It was unbearable. The whole thing. Every second worse than the last.[...] In the last weeks, we’d been reduced to spending our time together in recollection, but that was not nothing: The pleasure of remembering had been taken away from me, because there was no longer anyone to remember with. It felt like losing you co-rememberer meant losing the memory itself, as if the things we'd done were less real and important than they had been hour before."
"When you go into the ER, one of the first things they ask you to do is to rate your pain on a scale of one to ten, [...] And here it was, the great and terrible ten, slamming me again and again as I lay still and alone in my bed staring at the ceiling, the waves tossing me against the rocks then pulling me back out to sea so they could launch me again into the jagged face of the cliff, leaving me floating faceup on the water, undrowned."
Why did John Green decide to make Peter Van Houten reappear at almost the end of the book? Do you see any purpose of it?
The purpose is that there, Hazel and us can finally understand why AIA didn't have an ending and why he had been so rude with her and Augustus. Also, when Peter is finally understood, Hazel won't feel that all those years that she considered him as her best friend were a waste of time.
As a reader, you may have felt the story was practically over the moment Gus died. How do you think the novel will end? What do you expect to happen? Are you eager to go on reading?
When I first read it, I didn't imagined how it would end. I was kind of shocked, because I had never thought that he would die. I just kept reading to figure out what would happen, and specially because I wanted to know what would occur to Hazel.