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Chapter 1: Stella
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Five Feet Apart, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love and Sacrifice
Death, Grief, and Guilt
Risk and Consequences
Survival, Terminal Illness, and Hope
Hardship and Family Dynamics
Summary
Analysis
Will leaves his friends Jason and Hope in his hospital room. He sees an attractive girl (who is later revealed to be Stella) walk off and decides to follow her. He runs up the stairs to keep up with her, and eventually follows her into the neonatal intensive care unit. Will tries to talk to Stella but she brushes him off. Barb finds the two of them, and she chastises Will for leaving his floor and not wearing a mask. Back on their floor, Will chats to a nurse, Julie, and sees Stella’s name on a file. He goes back to his room and searches her full name, discovering that Stella has a very popular YouTube channel about cystic fibrosis. He watches a video and sees that Stella is eligible for a lung transplant. Will isn’t, since he has B. cepacia which makes his disease incurable.
Will is the new patient that Stella sees from outside his room. Stella often hangs out in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, or NICU, which is where babies born prematurely are treated. Some people with cystic fibrosis experience fertility problems, so Stella may enjoy spending time around babies because she doubts she will ever have any of her own—another sacrifice her illness forces her to make. B. cepacia is a bacterial lung infection that is incurable and extremely serious for people with cystic fibrosis. B. cepacia is also highly contagious, so it’s important that Will wear a mask around other patients, but here, he doesn’t take proper precautions. Readers can infer that Will feels like he should experience life as thoroughly as possible while he still can.
Themes
