Metaphors can be used creatively, imaginatively and generatively in health care as well as in life. Even a famously problematic metaphor such as the battle metaphor for illness can be rethought and continually reimagined. Such reusability may involve several strategies: a metaphor can be traced, challenged, extended and combined with others. Extension can imply new characters (civilians, marathon runners, Amazon warriors), different settings (a courtroom, a baseball field, outer space), new trajectories (defeat, surrender) and a range of attitudes (contentiousness, irony, humour, playfulness). A close reading of a metaphor’s context illuminates how the metaphor’s meaning is thickened when it is embedded, for example, in (or alongside) questions, exaggerations, second-person narration, negation and other stories that run parallel to it or function as frames. The aims of activating a metaphor’s usability are varied, too: while agency and resistance are recurring motivations (including resistance to social hierarchies, racial injustice and the biomedical discourses that uphold them), there are other important aims and outcomes including repair, self-knowledge, intensification and pleasure.

The five central texts here speak with and about metaphor in remarkable ways. Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor cautions us against metaphors that intensify affective states, such as shame and guilt; at the same time, Sontag looks for ways of writing and interpretation that evoke and grant access to sensory perception. Audre Lorde and Anatole Broyard respond to Sontag’s quest by exploring metaphor’s sensory and embodied side. For them, metaphor is at the centre of their grappling with a changed body as well as their fears of diminishment and extinction – both politically and existentially. Lorde and Broyard take self-knowledge and self-care to new levels by linking their search for meaning with social protest and personal growth (Lorde) as well as a playful yet serious style of vanity and campy exaggeration (Broyard). The texts here approach metaphor use and reuse in distinct and individual ways, yet they also speak to each other as they cut across important recurring issues: the ethics of feeling more (Sontag, Broyard), the risks of sameness overriding difference (Eve Ensler, Lorde, David Foster Wallace), the challenges of humour and irony (Broyard, Wallace), and the opportunities and limitations of specific genres and narrative forms (Sontag, Wallace). These issues are addressed in the course of rethinking the metaphor ‘illness is a battle’.