Summary of Susan Sontag's Illness as Metaphor

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Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors
The idea behind Susan Sontag`s book, Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors, was to create awareness about society`s response to fatal diseases. Sontag`s first section is developed around the metaphors that relate to disease and she persistently invokes her essay on cancer to make her argument more effective. It was 1976 when doctors informed Susan Sontag that she had breast cancer and that she could live only six more months. In search of a remedy she studied about cancer and later she underwent surgery. She started a new life after the surgery. During the time from the discovery of the illness and the surgery, Sontage experienced very hard realities of life and this experience added a fierce intensity to her life, making her able to understand the meaning of life more closely.
In the first section, Sontag introduces the contagious practice of describing illness through the use of metaphors. She was critical of those who theorize that some forms of cancer may be caused by an unhealthy state mind. She was of the view that people should understand the tyranny of false metaphors in order to liberate themselves from the language of fears and superstitions that had no basis in reality. This is the reason that she argued against the belief held by some people that an individual`s thoughts and self-image can cause illness. She argued that the relatively optimistic uses of sickness metaphors had been shattered, and cures were generally seen as only possible by way of revolutions. The author supports her contention in part by noting how noticeably inclined modern totalitarian movements have been to use disease imagery. In her prefatory comments Sontag herself binds thinking and sickness together by proposing that her intentions were to help the ill by changing their thinking about their diseases. She maintains that "the most truthful way of regarding illness—and the healthiest way of being ill—is one most purified of, resistant to, metaphoric thinking" (3).
Tuberculosis and cancer are defined as diseases burdened by mysterious battles and underlying secrets. For developing her thesis of tyranny of false metaphors, Sontag cautiously examined the older metaphorical ideas of tuberculosis as a pattern against which her readers can compare the contemporary metaphors of cancer. Despite having no interest in the medical concepts of the disease, Sontag selected as examples a wealth of material from literature. Her impressive prose crackles with fervor and indignation as she relates the attitudes toward tuberculosis during the Romantic period and compares the myths concerning that disease to later attitudes toward cancer. Since the metaphors relating to pathology either originated among writers, or because literary masters communicate in classic forms the most nearly representative metaphors taken from popular speech, writers serve as her primary source.
Sontag talks about the fantasies and accompanying horrors inspired by tuberculosis in the past and by cancer in modern times. She was of the view that changes in a society`s mode of discussion about illnesses would slowly witness a change. The author`s writing style crackles with excitement and annoyance as she discusses the approaches during the Romantic period toward tuberculosis. For example, she was very critical of author Norman Mailer for using the metaphor of ‘cancerphobe`.
In the beginning of the first section Sontag asserts her belief that in time, once a cure is found, the horror and mystery of cancer will dissolve as well as the metaphors by which it is described. She defined that diseases not defin...