What It Is: The road trip trope (trying saying that five times really fast) details the protagonist and his/her companions on a journey, often set about with a specific aim. Paper Towns, The Fault In Our Stars and An Abundance Of Katherines all feature some variation of the road trip trope. What It Means: Like the vast majority of stories, Green's novels tend to centre around a protagonist who goes through some sort of symbolic journey. In Paper Towns, Quentin goes from loving Margo to realising he's loving a shadow. In An Abundance Of Katherines, Colin goes from feeling like part of him is missing to realizing he's unique in his non-uniqueness. And in The Fault In Our Stars, Hazel goes from existing with cancer to living with it. In each of these novels, Green uses the road trip trope in order to better represent these changes. In Paper Towns, it's only at the end of the road trip to Agloe that Quentin realises the error of his ways. In The Fault In Our Stars, it's the trip to Amsterdam that not only physically but emotionally moves Augustus and Hazel's relationship forward.
