An Auto-Thanatographical Approach to Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air

Radwan, Mahmoud Ibrahim Ibrahim

doi:10.21608/jarts.2019.81793

An Auto-Thanatographical Approach to Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air

Author

Mahmoud Ibrahim Ibrahim Radwan

Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages (English Section), Faculty of Education, Tanta University

10.21608/jarts.2019.81793

Abstract

The study undertakes to examine Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air (2016) in the light of the deliberations on theories of ‘autothanatography’ embraced by several critics. It argues that when one is faced with own mortality, textuality can be instrumental in reformulating the popular phobic avoidant conceptualization of death as the commencement of the transience and the end of the self. It is Kalanithi’s cancer diagnosis that foments him to write his ‘authothanatography.’ In his narrative of the dying self, he unfolds how his professional, smooth familial and social life has been overturned and disrupted under the painful weight of the threatening illness. Kalanithi implements multiple strategies in an endeavor to move out of the defeating and pessimistic story of dying, to terminate his muddled state of life, to shift from diagnostic shock to living with cancer, and to restore predictability, control and production of desires. This is manifested in the struggle to tell his story of illness, to pursue his vocation in literature and philosophy and to restitute of the past self. The strategies Kalanithi has utilized contributed to his ability to face terminal illness and mortality with integrity and bravery to make his remaining days redolent

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