What gives life enough meaning to make it worth living? If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining? These are questions that Paul Kalanithi, a neurosurgical chief resident diagnosed with cancer by age thirty-six, asked himself through his literary work. Paul Kalanithi had, more times than most shall ever do, confronted death, wrestled it, examined it, and accepted it as both the physician and patient. Such a close relationship with this looming figure gave him the ability to seek out the real inextricability of life and death, facing both with a sense of integrity. It was in that inextricability, no matter doctor or patient, that Paul found his message of such necessity for communication that his fingers
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He is a loving husband and father, but also a neurosurgeon with a narrow-minded and cold view in times of necessity. That latter image of himself is the first raw side of Paul that readers witness through his first manipulation of diction, his questions. Death had sunk its claws deep into Paul’s chest years before the diagnosis that would slowly end him, it had loomed over the man’s shoulder every scrubbing before surgery, every request for a surgical tool, every tear for a lost patient, and every smile for a newly validated life and identity. The way death had meddled into the inner workings of life was the topic of Paul’s work. Paul often asked questions that opened doors and windows to his own attitudes towards the world he, and death, had created. Inquiry like, “If time dilates when one moves at high speeds, does it contract when one moves barely at all?” (197) or “Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? What better way to understand it than to live it?” (147) The concept attempting to illustrate itself with these questions is merely the intensity with which Paul viewed his topic, the transition from life to death, from one vocation to another, an intensity never rendering to those claws buried deep within him, claws represented in his last years as tumors so tightly attached to his lungs. Paul not only used the …show more content…
First, the diction specifically set for his novel titles. Paul broke his writing into two parts, the first named, “In Perfect Health I Begin,” which when compared to the second, “Cease Not till Death,” the intensity with which he views these two vastly diverse concepts and his transition is unyielding. That intensity though, as prominent as it may be, has moments of fragility where the lights of humor and storytelling peak through. For example, “Jeff laughed, and from that moment on, state population became our barometer for head-injury severity. “Is he a Wyoming or a California?” Jeff would ask, trying to determine how intensive his care plan should be,” (82). This is one story among many that Paul chooses to relive at arbitrary moments to perhaps display his ability to find beautiful tethers to a single moment, among his grappling between life and death. In different words, it was another face to his variety in
He is a loving husband and father, but also a neurosurgeon with a narrow-minded and cold view in times of necessity. That latter image of himself is the first raw side of Paul that readers witness through his first manipulation of diction, his questions. Death had sunk its claws deep into Paul’s chest years before the diagnosis that would slowly end him, it had loomed over the man’s shoulder every scrubbing before surgery, every request for a surgical tool, every tear for a lost patient, and every smile for a newly validated life and identity. The way death had meddled into the inner workings of life was the topic of Paul’s work. Paul often asked questions that opened doors and windows to his own attitudes towards the world he, and death, had created. Inquiry like, “If time dilates when one moves at high speeds, does it contract when one moves barely at all?” (197) or “Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? What better way to understand it than to live it?” (147) The concept attempting to illustrate itself with these questions is merely the intensity with which Paul viewed his topic, the transition from life to death, from one vocation to another, an intensity never rendering to those claws buried deep within him, claws represented in his last years as tumors so tightly attached to his lungs. Paul not only used the …show more content…
First, the diction specifically set for his novel titles. Paul broke his writing into two parts, the first named, “In Perfect Health I Begin,” which when compared to the second, “Cease Not till Death,” the intensity with which he views these two vastly diverse concepts and his transition is unyielding. That intensity though, as prominent as it may be, has moments of fragility where the lights of humor and storytelling peak through. For example, “Jeff laughed, and from that moment on, state population became our barometer for head-injury severity. “Is he a Wyoming or a California?” Jeff would ask, trying to determine how intensive his care plan should be,” (82). This is one story among many that Paul chooses to relive at arbitrary moments to perhaps display his ability to find beautiful tethers to a single moment, among his grappling between life and death. In different words, it was another face to his variety in