Without Pain How Could We Know Joy Analysis

There are moments that I ask, “Why does pain exist? Why do people die? Why do people hurt? Why do people cry for one another? Why do bad things happen?” It’s always difficult to find an answer. This pain that comes in to question plays a major role in this book. Pain affected everyone in every aspect of the story. This book exemplifies how pain affects people, how people handle it, if they can grow from it, and the point of it. First and foremost, it affected Hazel Grace Lancaster in the form of deadly cancer. Hazel had dealt with her disease, thyroid cancer with metastasis in her lungs, for most of her life. She knew a good amount of what pain was, and, in a way, learned how to deal with it. Deep inside of her, though, a significant amount …show more content…
Some people hide from it, and everyone despises it. Hazel grace states her opinion on pain when she says, “Without Pain, How Could We Know Joy? This is an old argument in the field of Thinking About Suffering, and its stupidity and lack of sophistication could be plumbed for centuries, but suffice it to say that the existence of broccoli does not in any way affect the taste of chocolate.” (pg 36-37). This time, I have to disagree with Hazel. I mean, I get what she’s saying. “Without pain, there would be no joy,” is a stupid concept. Joy is of its own, it can’t just not exist. Though if you look at this quote in an abstract manner, you could interpret it differently. What this quote is trying to explain, in my perspective, joyful things are always going to be joyful, but unappreciated without pain. You’re always going to find joyful aspects of your life as joyful, but you can never truly appreciate that it’s joyful without first experiencing pain. People could go their whole lives having joyful events occur to them, but the joyful things would never mean as much to them. A joyful thing would be just another joyful thing to them, nothing more. Pain is important because it causes us to reflect on our lives, and realize that we did have it good at some point. If we move past this pain, we will understand that everything from then on is truly wonderful. You can’t understand the feeling of reaching the top of a very high mountain until you’ve been at the bottom staring up. I think if Hazel understood the complexity of this quote, she would have agreed. She certainly appreciated the time she shared with Gus, because love is one of the rarest and most profound privileges you could receive in a