Illness As Metaphor

The opening of the book takes on a very literary mode as opposed to the more studied and scholastic one that follows. Here, Sontag makes use of an extended metaphor to relate how illness is akin to citizenship in a different kingdom: “Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick” (3). What is the value of this metaphor here, and why does Sontag, in a book that is so wary of the harmful aftereffects of metaphors, employ one to begin her text?

Following the opening sentence about illness being the nighttime to health’s daytime, Sontag rarely discusses the relationship between health and illness. In Chapter 3, she writes that, in the face of TB’s aestheticization and romanticization by the public, “health becomes banal, even vulgar” (36). How has the relationship between illness and health changed through the history the book presents? Would the text have been improved by more references to the perceptions of health throughout history?