When Breath Became Air Analysis

Paul Kalanithi was an English major turned neurosurgeon by the age of 35. However, when he was diagnosed with lung cancer he decided to fulfill his dream of being an author. In his personal memoir “When Breath Becomes Air”, Paul Kalanithi uses personal experiences to explain the effect of death on the living through logos, ethos, and pathos.

When the doctors informed Kalanithi that he had stage IV lung cancer he knew his time was running out, so he decided to do the one thing he had left: write a book.The poignant memoir starts off with a forward written by Abraham Verghese and then continues into a prologue. Succeeding, Kalanithi jumps back in time for the first half of the book and describes his childhood and how he came to be a neurosurgeon. For the second half, he focuses on the results of being diagnosed with lung cancer and how that altered his life. Overall, Kalanithi uses his book as an attempt to explain to all people the effect death has on the living.

In "When Breath Becomes Air", Paul Kalanithi uses his experiences as a doctor to convey …show more content…
This makes the work easier to understand because it takes the audience through his story, his life. It puts them in his shoes so that they are able to empathize with what he was going through and what he was feeling. This is important for the reader because it allows them to better understand his main point, the effect of death on the living. Although Kalanithi’s writing is very somber and at times dark, it really emphasizes to the reader how serious the topic is. After seven years of residency, Kalanithi’s lung cancer prohibited him from going to graduation. Instead of walking in a cap and gown across a stage he was “uncontrollably vomiting green bile”, soon to be stuck at the hospital in a hospital gown. By using his personal experiences, Kalanithi makes certain the fact that death is not something to be taken