Dayton

Dayton, Ohio, appears in the novel as a quietly ironic counterpoint to the grand, life-changing journey to Amsterdam. It is the city where Morris Property, Inc., the company that employs Hazel's father, maintains a satellite office. The Lancasters' black suitcase, a wedding present that was meant to accompany them on exotic adventures, instead spent its life making the unglamorous trip to Dayton. This detail underscores the way cancer has circumscribed the family's life, shrinking their world to the practical and the necessary, even as it highlights the quiet, unheroic sacrifices made by Hazel's parents. The suitcase's destiny to travel to Dayton rather than anywhere more remarkable becomes a small, poignant emblem of the ordinary life that illness has imposed upon them, a life of routine commutes and deferred dreams, making the eventual, improbable trip to Amsterdam all the more extraordinary.