Death and Dying: the Revelatory Experience of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Nina Riggs’ ‎The Bright Hour

Sabouri, Hossein; Savkay, Canan; Khanbazian, Amin

doi:10.22034/ijpie.2025.489335.1065

Death and Dying: the Revelatory Experience of Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Nina Riggs’ ‎The Bright Hour

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

Hossein Sabouri ¹

Canan Savkay ²

Amin Khanbazian ³

¹ University of Tabriz

² Faculty of Literature, Department of English Language and Literature, University of Istanbul, Turkey

³ Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, University of Tabriz, Iran

10.22034/ijpie.2025.489335.1065

Abstract

This paper explores the transformative experiences of confronting mortality in Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Nina Riggs' The Bright Hour—two memoirs of their lives in light of terminal cancer diagnoses. Drawing on the existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger—particularly his concept of “being-toward-death”—and L.A. Paul’s theory of transformative experience, this paper examines how Kalanithi and Riggs confronted crises of identity, meaning, and authenticity in the face of imminent death. Memoirs afford a rare prism through which proximity to death compels individuals to reassess values, priorities, and sense of self in profound personal and philosophic changes. The gap in the literature that this paper attempts to fill is the limited examination of self-reconstruction and authenticity within an existential perspective from nonfictional cancer memoirs. Both memoirs are far from being mere documentation of the dying process but are acts of self-reconstruction that show how writing can help someone reframe their understanding of life and death. These findings expose the recuperative and disclosive potential in life-writing during terminal diagnosis and how life-writing advances an understanding of the human condition and its authenticity. By applying this type of memoir using Heidegger’s and Paul’s frameworks, this paper adds to a better understanding of the existential importance of facing one’s death and its potential to stir profound changes in worldview and identity.

Keywords

Cancer memoirs

Dying process

Martin Heidegger

Terminal diagnosis

Trauma

Subjects

Literature and Education

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