Enter the Void: Identity and Recovery in Brain on Fire Nawal Elghourab 12th Grade

In Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness, Susannah Cahalan struggles to reconstruct the events during her month of madness in which Susannah’s twenty-four years of normality is suddenly lost in a matter of weeks. As her consciousness and physical body are no longer compatible, she is no longer able to comprehend what she is doing, and thus can no longer understand what she is becoming. With virtually no recollection of her actions, Cahalan’s self is fragmented, and she uses Brain on Fire to pioneer through her journey in hopes of redefining her identity.

Due to the lack of control that Susannah has over her actions, Susannah uses words such as monster and stranger to describe the part of her that she and her family repeatedly have to confront. For example, when she re-reads the journal entries of old Susannah “urgently [attempting] to communicate some deep,dark part of herself”(60), she describes it as incomprehensible even though she wrote it herself. This part of Susannah is a complete stranger, and a dysfunctional one. Her boyfriend, Stephen, stays by her side and Susannah describes it as Stephen "loving [her] enough"(58) to look past the sick Susannah and see the old Susannah in her. Just by saying this, she implies how her...