The Way We Live Now

Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1986

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Summary

Background

Story Analysis

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Chocolate

When Quentin worries that having too many flowers in his hospital room is depressing the protagonist, Kate offers to vary her sympathy gift and brings chocolate instead at Max’s suggestion. The consumption of chocolate in “The Way We Live Now” becomes a symbol of overindulgence and the lack of self-control. The more the protagonist consumes chocolate, the more anxious his friends become, quickly coming to loathe the sight of him “gobbling that damned chocolate” (Paragraph 4). His initial weight loss prompted their concern for their friend’s health prior to his diagnosis, because they viewed his unexplained thinness as a sign of illness. However, while he is hospitalized, they become concerned about his overeating of sweets and begin to advocate for a return to thinness as a sign of health and wellness.

The doctor sees no harm in the protagonist’s chocolate consumption, demonstrating that this is not a health-related issue. Subconsciously, the friends believe that when he eats chocolate, the protagonist demonstrates the same kind of “indulgence” that they blame for his current state; they equate his unrestrained consumption of dessert with what they perceive as an overly-indulgent sex life that led to his AIDS diagnosis. The friends complain about his consumption of sweets as a substitute for vocalizing their belief that the protagonist is reaping the consequences of his sexuality.

Hospitals

The hospital in “The Way We Live Now” is a separate social sphere that is kept in stasis away from the rest of the world. Within the hospital, the friends create a separate, idealized space—a narrative fantasy that looks to the outside as a “utopia of friendship” (Paragraph 8)—in which they perform the roles of caring, sympathetic supporters. They put aside “old feuds” to come together at the hospital bedside and pride themselves on the frequency with which they visit. Although the protagonist is the subject of their visits, their actions and conversations suggest that being seen supporting a hospitalized friend is more compelling than the emotional labor of providing actual support.

The static nature of the hospital separates it from the activity of life; this separation emphasizes the performance of support rather than the actual change and growth to be expected of people who are being faced with a friend’s suffering and possible death. The characters suspend their visits once the protagonist returns home, where there is no audience to witness their sacrifices. By functioning as a suspended fantasy for the performance of care, the hospital emphasizes the emptiness of the platitudes and shallow support that Sontag satirizes.

Diary

During his initial hospital stay, the protagonist begins keeping a diary, “because he want[s] to record the course of his mental reactions to this astonishing turn of events, to do something parallel to what the doctors were doing” (Paragraph 5). He downplays the significance of his writing when he describes the exercise to Quentin, minimizing it as capturing “banalities” instead of being honest about his use of writing to process the disbelief related to his diagnosis. Quentin reframes the diary as a symbol of hope, “slyly staking out his claim to a future time, in which the diary would be an object, a relic” (Paragraph 5). Instead, the diary is a symbol of the protagonist’s desire to control his own narrative. He is a terminally ill patient whose body and time are managed by others—hospital staff, doctors, his friends—but his diary is his own.

In its preservation of his handwriting through the progression of AIDS, the diary also conveys the development of the protagonist’s illness. Tanya, who sneaks a peak in the final paragraph, is concerned by his newly “spidery” script, which becomes unrestrained and disordered as his illness advances. The protagonist rarely speaks for himself in the narrative, and his messy handwriting demonstrates his diminishing ability to do so during his second hospital stay.