The Way We Live Now

“The Way We Live Now” is not primarily a story about AIDS; few details of the disease are included in the narrative, and little is revealed about the patient’s life or identity. Rather, it is a story that examines how people respond to an AIDS diagnosis and a satire that exposes the dehumanization of terminal patients by even their closest companions.

The title of “The Way We Live Now” is borrowed from English novelist Anthony Trollope’s 1875 satirical novel of the same name. Trollope’s novel establishes a framework that Sontag follows: A catastrophic event leads to a prolonged crisis, during which the author takes note of particular social failings. Specifically, Trollope lampoons the greed and dishonesty that were made evident by the economic depression following the Panic of 1873 and expressed in opportunistic marriage proposals and unscrupulous business deals. Sontag adopts the same approach as she critically examines social responses to terminal illness, specifically to AIDS. In this short story, the catastrophe is the discovery of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, which leads to the crisis of the epidemic and the failings of support systems. She demonstrates that the patient’s support network operates narratively—according to the stories people tell themselves—instead of being anchored logically in asking a patient what support they need and meeting those requests.

Sontag’s personal experience informs her writing. She identified as a bisexual woman and was part of the community that most directly faced the threat of AIDS. She was also a cancer survivor who faced her friends’ and family members’ euphemistic, figurative responses to potentially terminal illness, such as their hesitation to articulate the word “cancer.” As an activist, a writer, and a philosopher, Sontag recognized the importance of the language that people use to navigate medical issues, and incorporates this concept into the story.

The story is told through conversations that reflect a range of perspectives on the AIDS epidemic. For example, the characters are connected to the protagonist as both straight friends and allies and as members of the gay and queer community; they are men, women, lovers, Americans, and Europeans. The tone of the story is one of informal, and often thoughtless, gossip. Using fused sentences and avoiding quotation marks, Sontag effectively uses stream-of-consciousness narration to represent ongoing conversations among a large group of diverse people. Unlike a staged production with scripted dialogue uttered by clearly identifiable distinct characters, the story attempts to fuse real conversations that include interruptions, tangents, and casual sentence structure. The lack of punctuation and linear organization used to create this effect can make the written story difficult to follow, but these devices also capture a sense of familiarity and spontaneity that reflects the flow of the characters’ unfiltered thoughts and comments.

Even the difficulty of reading conversations with inadequate punctuation plays an important part in the overall impact of the story. The confusion that this stylistic choice can cause may make the reader go back through passages to determine who is speaking and to whom. The effort required to decode these roles slows the pace of the reading and demonstrates that the ideas being conveyed do not belong to just one person but are reflective of the group’s shifting—at times contradictory—attitudes and feelings as the patient’s illness develops.

Sontag uses familiar language, realistic conversations, and common phrases to expose the shallowness of the use of figurative language in discussions of terminal illness. This is most poignant in the persistent use of the vague word “disease” in place of articulating the specific name of a person’s medical condition. For example, the speakers in the story are well aware of the protagonist’s specific diagnosis and his likely means of infection, but they uphold the public taboo against articulating that he is a gay man with AIDS, even in private conversations. One character, Stephen, takes heart that the protagonist “from the start [...] was willing to say the name of the disease, pronounce it often and easily, as if it were just another word” (Paragraph 8). Stephen and his friends recognize that naming AIDS specifically demystifies the diagnosis and grounds it in the medical field. But even as Tanya adds, “We must say the name, too, and often […] we mustn’t lag behind him in honesty,” the friends are unable to do so consistently. AIDS continues to function in the narrative as a figurative monster, and the refusal to name it affirms and sustains it as taboo.

Each character is more invested in the performance of caring than in providing actual care for their friend. Many of the characters attempt to visit or call the protagonist daily; however, as they describe their efforts to one another, it becomes clear that this performance of caring is part of a social competition. Sontag explores the social prestige or status that derives from being attached to the dying and demonstrating the emotional fortitude that is required to support those who are terminally ill. The friend who is seen as sacrificing on behalf of the less fortunate one garners public sympathy and respect. This perception is increased when the illness is politicized, as in the case of AIDS; by visibly performing support for a gay man who is dying of a stigmatizing condition, the characters perform their liberal identities and politics. By focusing on the large network of friends and not on the protagonist, Sontag demonstrates that this ostensible support is cheapened by its obviously performative nature: The friends’ association with the protagonist benefits them far more—in terms of increased social prestige as heroes within their progressive peer group—than their visits aid their ill friend. Their efforts are dehumanizing: They reduce their friend to his diagnosis, and their platitudes and words of encouragement are empty.

Unlike introspective characters in a more traditionally constructed story with clear dialogue tags, Sontag’s cast speaks freely and does not always seem to know what their own words imply. When they rally against chocolate, for example, no one stops to think about why. The characters don’t recognize that they view chocolate as a symbol of indulgent behavior. They agree only that the protagonist seems to be eating too much of it, and it couldn’t possibly be “good” for him. Subconsciously, they are engaging in the same type of moralizing critiques as those who blame their friend’s health crisis on his lack of self-control or his unrestrained sexual appetites. Similarly, Yvonne is tone-deaf in her description of London’s response to the AIDS epidemic. She commends the American friends for being “cool and rational” for not shunning their mutual friend or being afraid to show him physical affection. She contrasts their compassion to the fear that drives the response in England, but never acknowledges the harm that those actions cause to English people with AIDS. Rather than considering the impact of this stigmatization on those who suffer from it, she focuses on self-congratulation.

The satirical display of thoughtless language related to disease extends the purposes of Sontag’s critical work Illness as Metaphor to a work of fiction. It addresses the selfishness of upholding taboos against speaking directly about diseases for the sake of sustaining public comfort, and highlights the dehumanizing impact that using euphemistic language about sickness—or refusing to speak about it at all—has on terminally ill patients. When illness is referred to narratively, rather than literally, the ill person becomes an object around which other characters may gather, and their afflictions become little more than cautionary tales used to warn others and police their behavior.