Conflict Analysis Of Main Character In The Novel “The Fault In Our Stars” By John Green

ISSN: 2302-920X

Jurnal Humanis, Fakultas Ilmu Budaya Unud

Vol 17.1 Oktober 2016: 20 – 26

Conflict Analysis Of Main Character In The Novel “The Fault In Our Stars” By John Green

Angelika Arif Margiraharjo^1*, I Gusti Ngurah Parthama², Sang Ayu Isnu Maharani³

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¹²³English Department, Faculty of Arts , Udayana University ¹[[email protected]] ²[[email protected]] ³[[email protected]]

Corresponding Author

Abstrak

Judul makalah ini adalah Conflict Analysis of Main Character in The Novel “The Fault in Our Stars” by John Green. Penelitian ini berfokus pada konflik yang dijelaskan dalam karakter utama (konflik eksternal dan internal), dan presentasi dari karakter utama dari novel melalui aspek psikologis. Konflik dianalisis berdasarkan teori sastra yang diusulkan oleh Kenney (1966) yang membagi konflik menjadi dua jenis, konflik eksternal dan internal. Deskripsi presentasi dari karakter utama dianalisis berdasarkan teori yang diusulkan oleh Bernhardt (1953).

Data penelitian ini diambil dari sebuah novel berjudul “The Fault in Our Stars”. Pengumpulan data dilakukan melalui metode dokumenter. Hal ini dilakukan dengan membaca novel dan biografi penulis, dan kemudian dilanjutkan dengan menandai dan mencatat bagian dari novel yang berkaitan dengan penelitian.

Analisis ini menghasilkan beberapa kesimpulan. Hazel sebagai karakter utama digambarkan sebagai karakter yang sangat bijaksana. Itu sebabnya dia mendapat banyak perdebatan diantara pemikirannya, dan mendapat banyak konflik engan orangorang di sekelilingnya. Setelah semua konflik dilalui dia akhirnya menyadari bahwa hidupnya sebenarnya baik-baik saja. Manusia kadang-kadang terjebak dalam beberapa konflik sehari-hari dan manajemen konflik dibutuhkan untuk menyelesaikan konflik apakah itu benar atau salah.

Kata kunci: Konflik, Karakter Utama, Konflik internal, Konflik Eksternal, The Fault in Our Stars Novel.

• 1.    Background of the Study

There are many types of conflicts. A story may deal with a conflict within a single person, a conflict among people, a conflict between people and society, between

people and nature, and so on. Conflict refers to a person and his/her life situation. It is only situation that offers a conflict (Kenney 1966:19).

The focus of this study is the main character’s conflict as portrayed in The Fault in Our Stars. The Fault in Our Stars is the sixth novel by the author John Green, published in January 2012. The story is narrated by a sixteen-year-old cancer patient named Hazel Grace Lancaster, who is forced by her parents to attend a support group where she subsequently meets and falls in love with the seventeen-year-old, Augustus Waters, an ex-basketball player and amputee. This novel presents us with strong characters, language, themes and new perspective on cancer and romance. It takes a spin on universal themes – Will I be loved? Will I be remembered? Will I leave a mark on this world? – by dramatically raising the stakes for the characters who are asking. Green proves through his characters that lasting love requires the risk of losing it. The characters invite us to laugh and live the life to the fullest for as long as we can.

• 2.    Problems

Based on the background mentioned above, the focus of this study is limited to the study of conflicts. The problems of this study are as follows:

• 1.    What kinds of conflict of the main character found in the novel The Fault in Our Stars?

• 2.    How does John Green describ the main character through its conflict in relation to psychological aspect?

• 3.    Aims

• 1.    To identify and analyze the kinds of conflicts in the main character of the novel.

• 2.    To describe the presentation of the main character of the novel.

• 4.    Research Method

The data of this study were taken from the novel entitled The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. The method and technique used to collect the data was the documentation method through reading and taking notes. The data in this study were analyzed

qualitatively based on the theory of conflict proposed by Kenney (1966) and the theory of psychological aspect proposed by Bernhardt (1953).

• 5.    Result and Discussion

The data analysis is divided into two parts; analysis of conflict and the psychological analysis of the main character. The conflicts were analyzed into two general parts of conflicts; external and internal conflict. The analysis of psychological aspects of the main character is divided into wants,

• a.    Analysis of Conflict

The conflicts were analyzed into two general parts of conflicts; external and internal conflict.

- External Conflict

In this novel the analysis of external conflict of the main character is only in term of the conflict between the main character and supporting characters (conflict between individuals). The following quotation:

Hazel : You get to battle cancer. That is your battle. And you’ll keep fighting, you’ll..you’ll…live your best life today. This is your war now.

Gus : Some war. What am I war with? My cancer. And what is my cancer? My cancer is me. The tumors are made of me. They’ve made of me as surely as my brain and my heart are made of me. It is a civil war, Hazel Grace, with a predetermined winner.

Hazel : Gus.

Hazel has just really fallen in love with Augustus. Firstly, she thinks she is a grenade for Augustus that can explode anytime and it can make Augustus get hurt and she does not want that thing to happen. Then one day Augustus tells her that he is sick. It is getting worse than before. His tumor is coming back. He thinks there will no hopes for him but then Hazel tells him to fight the cancer. They are arguing about what will Augustus need to fight for.

- Internal Conflict

Hazel is a very thoughtful person. She is often overthinking of anything and it makes her get complicated with her own mind. This is one of those conflicts in her mind; look at the following quotation :

So I excused myself on the grounds of pain and fatigue, as I often had over the years when seeing Kaitlyn or any of my other friends. In truth, it always hurt. It always hurt not to breathe like a normal person, incessantly reminding your lungs to be lungs, forcing yourself to accept as unsolvable the clawing scraping inside-out ache of under-oxygenation. So I wasn’t lying, exactly, I was just choosing among truths.

Hazel gets anti-social after her cancer is getting worse, but it does not mean that she hates people near her. She loves her mom and also her best friend. Actually, she thinks her friends in school want to help her through her cancer, but there is nothing they can do so she just accepts the truth. She also feels bad for not being able to breathe like normal people do; she even forgets how to breathe normally. It really hurts her every time that she needs to remind her lung to be lung, to keep working over although there is cancer in her lungs. It also hurts her to force herself to accept aa unsolvable ache when it gets worst. The fact shows that she cannot do anything about it except accepting the truth.

• b.    The Psychological Analysis of the Main Character

The analysis of psychological aspect of the main character is divided into want, emotion, and feeling as follows:

• -    Wants

The most wants of the main character is Hazel wants Van Houten which is the writer of her favorite book to tell her the whole of the lost part of her favorite book. The following is the quotation :

Mr. Van Houten, I understand from your email to Augustus that you are not planning to publish any more books. In a way, I am disappointed, but I’m also relieved: I never have to worry whether your next book will live up to the magnificent perfection of the original. As a three-year survivor of Stage IV cancer, I can tell you that you got everything right in An Imperial Affliction. Or at least you got me right. Your book has a way of telling me what I’m feeling before I even feel it, and I’ve reread it dozens of times. I wonder, though, if you would mind answering a couple questions I have about what happens after the end of the novel. I understand the book ends

because Anna dies or becomes too ill to continue writing it, but I would really like to know what happens to Anna’s mom.

The email that Hazen has send to Van Houten above clearly explains that she seriously wants to know the answers to her questions about what happens after the end of her favorite novel. She asks what happens about the other characters because she probably knows that Anna is dead. Hazel realizes that all of her questions are not important questions and Van Houten’s novel is full-filled of important literary questions. She really wants to know that and it haunts her for years. She is wondering over all the unimportant questions. She tells Van Houten that if he wants to write something and is not willing to publish it, she will love to read it. Even the smallest thing, she really wants to read.

• -    Emotions

The emotion in human being is reflected in the character of the story in The Fault in Our Stars, it is reflected through Hazel’s attitude and mind. There are many tproblems that make Hazel the main character get into emotionional. Look at the following quotation :

“When,” I said. She nodded. “Even when you die, I will still be your mom, Hazel. I won’t stop being your mom. Have you stopped loving Gus?” I shook my head. “Well, then how could I stop loving you?”

“Okay,” I said. My dad was crying now. “I want you guys to have a life,” I said. “I worry that you won’t have a life, that you’ll sit around here all day with no me to look after and stare at the walls and want to off yourselves.”

Hazel is afraid of her parents getting no life when she dies someday. Actually, she does not want to leave her parents but her cancer reminds her that day when she cannot stand with the pain anymore and she will die. She heard from her mother that she will never be a mother again that day when she was in hospital. She feels like she is supposed not to be there in this world. Also she is afraid that her parents will get depressed the rest of their life and regret over everything.

• -    Feelings

Many feelings of Hazel make her fall down on her mind. Because most of Hazel’s feelings, she just keeps for her, she cannot express it to other people or even share it. Look at the following quotation :

Later, after they’d given me something, the nurse came in and she was kind of stroking my hand while she took my blood pressure and she said, “You know how I know you’re a fighter? You called a ten a nine.” But that wasn’t quite right. I called it a nine because I was saving my 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.

It happens when she heard that Augustus is already gone. It obviously makes her hurt and cry over the pain. The feeling is worse than she feels once when she gets into the ER. She needs to rate her pain on a scale of one to ten and she hold up nine fingers. The nurse tells her that she is a fighter, because she calls a nine a ten. She calls it a nine because she is saving her ten for this case. When she knows it from Augustus’s mom that he is already gone, she feels terribly hurt. It is not getting better, the seconds just go worse for her. The longer that she cries, the more she gets in pain. It is unbearable for her.

• 6.    Conclusion

In The Fault in Our Stars novel, there are two intrinsic elements that have been analyzed; they are conflicts and the psychological aspects of the main character.

The conflict of Hazel could be categorized into two general types: external and internal conflicts. For the external conflict, it is shown in this story that most conflicts occur among people. And the internal conflict is shown by how Hazel gets a lot of wars between in her mind.

The analysis of psychological aspects of the main character is divided into wants, emotions, and feelings. The wants are mostly about what she wants to know about the whole lost part of her favorite book. The emotion, it is reflected through Hazel Grace’s attitude. The feeling is mostly about her relationship with Augustus and her parents.

• 7.    Bibliography

Bernhardt, Karl S. 1953. Practical Psychology. Toronto: McGraw – Hill Book Company.

Kenney, William. 1966. How to Analyze Fiction. New York. Monarch Press.

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