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The Way We Live Now Susan Sontag Analysis

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A Wake Up Call In Susan Sontag Short Story, “The Way We Live Now” During the 1980’s, the epidemic of AIDS was common among small gay communities, but soon it began to spread rapidly. Many organizations and activists continued to educate young people to protect themselves. In ‘The Way We Live Now,” Susan Sontag uses life and death to help readers follow the life of a man dying from AIDS. The story mainly focuses on his friends being concerned about his disease. The story is told in the form of conversation, mentioned and whispered by his friends while he is sick in a hospital bed with AIDS. In beginning, the author uses theme to capture the narrator’s friends realizing that he is keeping a secret from all of them. He tells each friend something …show more content…

Stephen, one of the narrator's friends, is hopeful to save the narrator indicating on page 587. He asked the doctors questions and listened to their advice, but didn’t believe them. “ Stephen was the one who asked the most informed questions, who’d been keeping up not just with the stories that appeared several times a week in the Times (which Greg confessed to have stopped reading, unable to stand it anymore) but with articles in the medical journals published here and in England and France, and who knew socially one of the principal doctors in Paris who was doing some much-publicized research on the disease, but his doctor said little more than that the pneumonia was not life-threatening, the fever was subsiding, of course, he was still weak but he was responding well to the antibiotics, that he’d have to complete his stay in the hospital, which entailed a minimum of twenty-one days on the I.V., before she could start him on the new drug.” This explains how Stephen has the most knowledge about medicine and the treatments for AIDS. This shows you how his friends want to save his

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He creates a playful tone towards the harsh environment described in the short story. He describes the lifelike house as if it were a simple minded living being. For example he gave the house features of repetition and used phrases like, “it repeated the date three times for memory 's sake!”. His choice of words are charming and lighthearted rather than unpleasant to the ear. He continues to use these such words throughout even when he begins to talk of the sick scene.

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