As the tide washed in, the Dutch Tulip Man faced the ocean: “Conjoinder rejoinder poisoner concealer revelator. Look at it, rising up and rising down, taking everything with it.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Water,” the Dutchman said. “Well, and time.”
—Peter Van Houten,An Imperial Affliction
This quote is the epigraph that precedes
On top of playfully advertising Green’s belief about the importance of fiction, the epigraph introduces one of the novel’s most omnipresent symbols: water. Water represents suffering in both its negative and positive varieties. An example of the negative is the pain of cancer, and an example of the positive is the pain Hazel feels after losing Augustus, which although terrible is actually a sign of how much he mattered to her and how much she loved him. The symbol is vast in that it uses a single image to encapsulate these two different ideas, which are like two opposing poles. The Dutch Tulip Man captures this all-encompassing quality by describing water with opposing names. For instance, it’s a conjoiner, meaning it brings things together, but it’s also a poisoner. It’s a concealer that hides, and it’s also a revelator that reveals. He goes on to link water and time, and his meaning is less certain here. One interpretation is that time possesses the same all-encompassing quality. It’s the thing that allows us to grow, develop, and hit our prime, and it’s also that which causes us to decay, wither, and inevitably die. And both water and time, he suggests, take everything with them in their tide.