There is no way around Susan Sontag (1933–2004) in a book on illness metaphors. I decided to dedicate an entire chapter to Sontag’s use of metaphors for two reasons. First, Sontag fits the profile of the writers I am considering in this book: she is an intellectual whose experience of severe illness inspired writing that has become canonical for the Medical Humanities; this writing not only uses metaphors but also engages them head-on. Second, Sontag’s engagement with metaphors is full of contradictions and incongruities: while she dismisses the harmful uses of metaphors in her essays, she also experiences their empowering and nourishing potential in her own illness experiences and in her reflections on writing, style and interpretation.

Rather than identifying the flaws in her argument or offering neat justifications for them, this chapter takes Sontag’s incongruities as a valuable point of departure. I start by identifying the specific strategies she uses to challenge the ‘illness is war’ commonplace, and I explore the multiple and unpredictable uses to which Sontag puts this same metaphor. As Sontag herself contends, ‘metaphors cannot be distanced just by abstaining from them. They have to be exposed, criticised, belabored, used up’ (Illness 179). While Sontag indeed does many things with and to metaphors, she never quite ‘uses up’ this resource. Her diverse, sustained, critical relationship with metaphor serves as the basis for what this book tries to develop: a more capacious understanding of the varied usability of metaphors and a method for a critical and mindful engagement with metaphor.

Importantly, Sontag does not limit her critique to metaphor, but also questions the value and use of autobiographical narrative and genre. In refusing to tell yet another story ‘in the first person of how someone learned that she or he had cancer, wept, struggled, was comforted, suffered, took courage’, Sontag chose the argumentative, polemical style of the essay (Illness 101). Though highly generative for her specific purpose, Sontag realised later that the essay form also foreclosed other, more tentative and exploratory approaches that would allow her to express her own uncertainties and ‘integrate thought and feeling’ (Jurecic, Illness 74). In the last section, I take Sontag’s search for what Deborah Nelson calls a ‘pedagogy of the senses’ (117) as an inspiration to ask how metaphors are related to affect and sensory experience.