Attending to Illness Metaphors

Abstract

Abstract Critiques such as Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor have encouraged the renunciation of metaphorical thinking about illness. This article suggests a level of discernment toward implicit interpretations of illness instead of an all-or-nothing removal of metaphor from the rhetoric surrounding illness. Rather than doing away with metaphorical thinking about illness in a total and absolute sense, the article reflects on illness metaphors to explore what insight they may have to impart about lived experiences of illness. With the help of literary expressions in Camus’s The Plague, the article depicts ways that through a discerning attitude toward metaphorical thinking on illness, an elemental affirmation of being within the necessary limits on the human condition is given space to breathe.