Pain as Literary Art: A Reading of Illness Memoirs to Understand the Use of the Figurative Language to Define Illness, Life and Mortality

The first-person illness narratives offer a new language and the representative terms, in which the pain of unspeakable can be articulated. Illness narratives allow space for the figurative use of language to express the unspeakable thoughts, so that others can recognize and empathize with the narrators. The narrators of the illness memoirs need a second language so that they can express their suppressed thoughts. Tropes in Illness narratives can be considered, as Sarah Pet says ‘Devil’s dictionary’ or ‘the Language of Pain’ as termed by David Biro. The researcher in this paper studies the illness memoirs The Undying by Anne Boyer and Dying- A Memoir by Cory Taylor, and makes a note on the figurative use of language designed by the narrators to articulate unexpressed pain, and to understand the codes used by the narrators to heighten the sensibilities. Pain is an all-encompassing entity, and that’s why, it has rightly been said, that pain is the black hole into which language seems to disappear. Metaphors and their place in the decoration of illnesses have been acclaimed for a long. Virginia Woolf captures her ‘romanticized’ views on illness in her essay On Being Ill. But, Susan Sontag in her classic Illness as Metaphor disapproves of the metaphorical use of language to describe illnesses, because, according to her, it may distort the realistic approaches to illnesses. But, the figurative language has always been helpful to ease out the representation of illness. According to David Biro, language itself is inherently metaphorical and there is no other way, but to make use of metaphors if we wish to express the unexpressed thoughts. Thus, at the heart of this research, the researcher explores the figurative use of language developed by the narrators to define illness, life, and deat