The Way We Live Now

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Illness as a Metaphor

“The Way We Live Now” reflects the themes of Sontag’s 1978 theoretical work Illness as Metaphor, in which she dissects the linguistic correlation between disease and the personality of the afflicted person. The metaphorical description of disease ignores or misunderstands medical explanations for illness in favor of cultural and social assumptions about it. Relatively benign examples of this phenomenon include the misconceptions that depressed people are more likely to fall ill; quiet, shy people suffer from “delicate” health; and outgoing people are less likely to catch colds. Not only are these assumptions medically unsound, but they also reflect negatively on individuals who suffer from illness or disease.

Associating a person’s personality or character with a medical condition casts blame on the afflicted person, suggesting a level of responsibility in their diagnosis. A dangerous and harmful example of this behavior is the 1980s view of AIDS as a “gay cancer” sent as a divine punishment for one’s actions. Reflecting on her experiences undergoing treatment for breast cancer, Sontag rejects the concept that mental health issues generate cancerous tumors. She also fights against the notions that illnesses such as tuberculosis and cancer are divine punishments or the product of personality types. This approach inspires patient advocacy and a strictly physical, medical approach to the treatment of disease.

Unlike a narrative or psychoanalytical approach to disease, Illness as Metaphor argues that using illness as a metaphor that represents types or demographics of people is harmful. Illness is not a figurative device that responds to personality; it is a scientific reality. Sontag argues that the best way to approach the concept of disease is literally, rather than figuratively, by treating the body rather than the character of a patient. She observes that divorcing the person from the disease actually offers more emotional support to those facing severe and terminal illness. Patients are not their diagnosis; they have a diagnosis. This compartmentalization gives patients agency and refuses to limit their experience to the story of illness.

“The Way We Live Now” demonstrates the consequences of a metaphorical approach to illness through its erasure of the protagonist’s identity. The protagonist is unnamed, and minimal information is supplied about him, apart from the critical comments on his sex life that assign blame to him for his illness. Although the breadth of his relationships suggests that he has a rich life and a dynamic personality, the story’s focus on disease reduces the man to his diagnosis. His personality, wants, desires, and hopes are minimized in the face of his health crisis, and he becomes a cautionary tale or a tragic story rather than a fully rendered character.

The Spectacle of Tragedy

Connection to the terminally ill has an immediate impact on the lives of people around them. While friends and family may not be medically impacted by the diagnosis, they are socially impacted and adapt their words, actions, and habits in relationship to the medical crisis. In the case of a major catastrophe, such as an epidemic, overexposure to the horrific nature of the crisis impacts people’s emotional responses. Dependent on their experiences with and proximity to the danger, they may convert tragedy into a spectacle.

This is the catalyst for “The Way We Live Now”: People respond to their friend’s AIDS diagnosis in the early years of a terrifying epidemic. Powerless to change his outcome and still healthy themselves, they call one another and gather together to share news, gossip, and speculation. Prior to the diagnosis, the friends discuss the protagonist’s weight loss and fatigue and worry about what it means that he quit smoking. The subject of his health becomes an irresistible source of fascination:

It seemed that everyone was in touch with everyone else several times a week, checking in, I’ve never spent so many hours at a time on the phone, Stephen said to Kate, and when I’m exhausted after the two or three calls made to me, giving me the latest, instead of switching off the phone to give myself a respite I tap out the number of another friend or acquaintance, to pass on the news (Paragraph 1).

Stephen describes a drive to participate in something extraordinary and an unwillingness to miss out on information. The anticipation of diagnosis and longing for details energize the protagonist’s social network; the friends feel something akin to entertainment as they observe this illness’s progression.

The voyeuristic nature of this tragedy is driven home during the protagonist’s second hospital stay. Sontag does not specify how long the protagonist has been in the hospital or even how much time passed since his initial diagnosis, but his exhaustion implies that it feels like a very long time. When he awakes from a nap one day to find two friends, Donny and Kate, sitting in his room for a visit, he asks them to tell him “about something that’s going on,” begging them to “tell [him] a story” (Paragraph 13). Cordoned off from the real world, at a time without internet or social media, the protagonist longs for a distraction or some connection to the space outside his hospital room. Kate tells him, “You’re the story” (Paragraph 13). This theme permeates the work: Once he’s diagnosed with AIDS, the protagonist is reduced to a story, and his friends gain social capital by reporting on it to others who do not have direct access to the patient.

The Progression of Grief

The grief of the story is protracted and changeable, and it functions on both communal and personal levels. Mirroring the stages of grief that one feels following a loss, the story begins with denial. The protagonist denies the severity of his symptoms and fears an official diagnosis that would prove him wrong. He says that “becoming seriously ill was something that happened to other people” (Paragraph 1); following his positive diagnosis, the protagonist becomes one of those “other people” to his circle of friends. Throughout the remainder of the narrative, their grief—rather than his suffering—is given primary attention.

Just as the progression of a terminal illness is uncertain, the process of grief is individualized and, thus, varies for different characters. Still functioning in a space of denial, the friends collectively bypass the anger stage and enter a stage of bargaining. They cannot cure AIDS, but they can encourage the protagonist to care for his “health” in other ways, such as diet. By focusing on what their friend consumes, they gain a sense of power and control. They try to control variables that they hope will promote a positive outcome, and they focus on erasing symptoms such as weight loss that provide evidence to the contrary. This process allows them a false sense of security.

This friend group experiences anger as a later stage of grief. Some characters, such as Betsy, grow angry with the protagonist; she complains that he plays favorites among his visitors. Others blame him for “loosen[ing] the bonds of love that united the friends around him” (Paragraph 12) by not recognizing their sacrifices on his behalf. Some of them grow angry with each other. Their “old feuds,” such as “the flickering enmity between Lewis and Frank” (Paragraph 12), disrupt their collective efforts at providing support, but they also allow the characters a release valve for their anxiety. They lash out at one another because it is futile to lash out at a disease.

Many characters become arrested in the anger stage, unable to move forward. Quentin snarls at Betsy and rages at Victor. Stephen and Kate mutter their frustration at having no power to make positive changes, while Quentin resents their efforts to center themselves in the protagonist’s care and thereby diminish his role. Stephen, at the conclusion, has to remind the collected group that “he’s still alive” as they fixate on signs of their friend’s likely death (Paragraph 14).

Stephen’s reminder shows the difference between characters like himself, who remain both angry and hopeful, and characters like Ursula, who progress to acceptance by the story’s conclusion. Unlike the division of experiences according to sexual orientation that Quentin emphasizes, the final social divide of the story is between those who process their grief and those who are not able to do so. Sontag does not shy away from the hopelessness associated with an AIDS diagnosis in the mid-1980s, prior to the development of the first effective treatments and therapeutic interventions.