This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A new study examining death-related conceptual metaphors employed by neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi in his memoir, "When Breath Becomes Air," sheds light on how he depicted death after being diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer at age 36. The memoir, published posthumously following Kalanithi's death in 2015, received notable coverage and significant literary recognition.
It was selected as a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Biography. Led by researchers from the University of Sharjah, the study investigates how Kalanithi constructs the meaning of death through the use of metaphors. Drawing directly on textual evidence from the memoir, the authors identify and examine death-related metaphors in Kalanithi's primary narrative and classify them into broad discursive frameworks.
The paper, published in the journal Language and Health, further explores the distribution and contextual functions of these metaphors within the distinctive genre of a medical literary autobiography. It highlights the blending of Kalanithi's dual identities as a neurosurgeon-turned-terminally ill patient. Using the Metaphor Identification Procedure Vrije Universiteit (MIPVU), a widely recognized method used to identify metaphorical expressions in texts, the researchers found 211 instances of death discourse metaphors in the memoir.
These were classified into five major metaphor frames and 10 subordinate metaphor types. The findings reveal that Kalanithi predominantly conceptualizes death in his memoir "as a transition or movement, followed by a negative presence, an overwhelming or obscuring force, a concluding performance, and a biomedical breakdown." "Furthermore, the results demonstrate how illness discourse, by its nature, blends medical discourse with personal and existential discourse and modifies conventional death metaphors," the authors write. Metaphors are fundamental to human cognition and communication.
In "When Breath Becomes Air," Kalanithi employs them not merely as stylistic embellishments but as powerful conceptual tools through which he understands and articulates a personal experience of dying. His metaphors show that death can be shared, narrated and contemplated despite its abstract and intangible reality. The authors argue that Kalanithi's memoir offers a particularly rich site for examining death metaphors within a work of nonfiction that seamlessly intertwines literary narrative with medical discourse.
They demonstrate that metaphorical representations of death arise not only from his expertise as a neurosurgeon but also from his deeply personal understanding of bodily decline as he confronted his own mortality. Among the most compelling findings of the research is Kalanithi's recurrent use of departure metaphors. Through these figurative constructions, death is conceptualized as the author leaving the world, moving away or passing from one state of existence to another.
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