Rijksmuseum

The Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam's national museum, appears in The Fault in Our Stars not as a visited location but as a symbol of the heroic narratives that cancer denies its victims. Augustus Waters, confined to a wheelchair and in the grip of a terminal recurrence, tells Hazel Grace Lancaster that he researched the museum's collection online before their trip, knowing they would be physically unable to walk through it. His description of the paintings he found there becomes a devastating critique of how art and history memorialize death, and a lament for the kind of meaningful end he craves but will not receive.

The Unvisited Museum and the Heroic Ideal

Augustus explains to Hazel that the Rijksmuseum is filled with paintings of dramatic, meaningful deaths: Jesus on the cross, a man being stabbed in the neck, people dying at sea and in battle, and a parade of martyrs. He emphasizes the glaring absence in this catalogue of noble suffering, stating, "Not. One. Single. Cancer. Kid." He points out that no one is depicted dying from the plague, smallpox, or yellow fever, because, in his view, "there is no glory in illness. There is no meaning to it. There is no honor in dying of." The museum, a repository of cultural memory, becomes for Augustus a monument to the kind of death that can be framed as a sacrifice or a battle, a category from which his own slow, undignified decline is excluded.

The Absence of Meaning in Illness

Augustus's analysis of the Rijksmuseum's collection directly challenges the conventional language of cancer as a battle. He argues that his cancer is not an external enemy but a part of himself, making his struggle a "civil war" with a "predetermined winner." The museum's heroic tableaux offer no template for his experience. His observation that there is no honor in dying of illness underscores a central theme of the novel: the difficulty of finding meaning or a legacy in a death that is random, internal, and devoid of the clear-cut moral stakes of a battlefield. The Rijksmuseum, in this context, represents the stories that are told and celebrated, and the stories—like his own—that are not.

The Unrealized Visit and the Loss of the Future

The fact that Augustus and Hazel never actually visit the Rijksmuseum is itself significant. Their inability to walk through the museum is a concrete consequence of their illnesses, a physical limitation that prevents them from accessing a shared cultural experience. Augustus's research from afar becomes a poignant act of longing for a future he knows he will not have. The museum stands as a symbol of all the things—travel, art, a long life—that cancer has stolen from them. Hazel later reflects on this loss, thinking of the ocean from thirty thousand feet, a sight she will likely never see again, and concludes that "the voracious ambition of humans is never sated by dreams coming true." The Rijksmuseum, like Amsterdam itself, becomes a memory of a possibility that was briefly held and then lost.