Genre
Nonfiction
Setting and Context
Present day
Narrator and Point of View
Narrated in first person from Atul Gawande’s point of view.
Tone and Mood
The tone is straightforward and the mood is neutral.
Protagonist and Antagonist
The protagonist is elderly people and the antagonist is the poor end-of-life medical care.
Major Conflict
Gawande takes notice of the philosophy in the western world on taking care of the old as they approach their death. Rather than focus on extending life and improving its quality, they only look at survival.
Climax
The climax occurs when Felix and Bella return home to have their independence.
Foreshadowing
The stories of families with elderly people during their end foreshadow the author’s own experience with his father’s illness and death.
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
“This is a book about the modern experience of mortality—about what it’s like to be creatures who age and die, how medicine has changed the experience and how it hasn’t, where our ideas about how to deal with our finitude have got the reality wrong.”
Imagery
“Even as our bones and teeth soften, the rest of our body hardens. Blood vessels, joints, the muscle and valves of the heart, and even the lungs pick up substantial deposits of calcium and turn stiff. Under a microscope, the vessels and soft tissues display the same form of calcium that you find in bone. When you reach inside an elderly patient during surgery, the aorta and other major vessels can feel crunchy under your fingers.”
Paradox
Despite the advanced technology in the medical world, the developed and sophisticated societies still cannot provide satisfactory hospice care for the old.
Parallelism
“Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.”
Metonymy and Synecdoche
“Had he lived in the West, this would have seemed absurd.”
Personification
“Now we consult Google”
