Abstract

Time is a major theme in John Green's young adult and romantic novel, The Fault in our Stars (2012). Green spent ten years trying to write the book. Even though Hazel and Gus experience typical teenage problems, as well as extreme physical hardships and psychological conflicts due to their cancer disease, they still manage to have a great time together. They fall in love with one another, meet their favorite author, and share a common interest in reading books. They decide to live a life that could be short overflowing with content, notwithstanding their impending death, breathing tubes and worried parents. In this paper, I choose to approach the notion of time that passes in the narrative and how it plays out through the structure of TFIOS based on the narrative theory of time by Paul Ricoeur in his book Narrative and Time (1984). Ricoeur’s 'unfolding representative stages' are called threefold mimesis—prefiguration (pre-understanding), configuration (emplotment), and refiguration (embedded contextuality)—all three are used to create a triadic bridge model of structural relations between narrative and time. However, it is Green himself who offers the greatest insight into his work. Through his readings, writings, the Vlogbrothers channel and interviews, he provides the readers with tools to share his imaginative vision and empathetic character portrayals. A major influence on the development of TFIOS was Esther Earl, a concrete case of a girl who died of cancer at the age of 16. The structural time devices in TFIOS are not always linear, but also synoptic conveying the narrative formations of time. Elements like flashbacks and flashforwards are employed. Green deals with time as duration, both chronological and psychological, the time it takes a reader to actually read and time as an organizational device. Time is also a subject both Green and the characters speculate about, particularly in their fear of oblivion and their need to be remembered after death. The author presents how time passes and how a disease like cancer affects young adolescents in real life.

Key words: 21st-Century young adult literature, romantic narrative, time, John Green, TFIOS, life and death, cancer disease, teenage issues.