When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi is a memoir that documents Paul’s journey battling lung cancer. Paul is a doctor, a neurosurgeon to be exact. The irony of the entire story is that Paul is a doctor who has the ability to figure out that he has cancer before he is even diagnosed by an oncologist: “I don’t know for a fact that I have cancer. I’m just pretty sure of it– a lot of the symptoms point that way” (21).
Not only is the entire memoir ironic, but Paul writes specific lines that demonstrate irony, even from the offset of the memoir. He writes: “I wasn’t in the radiology suite, wearing my scrubs and white coat. I was dressed in a patient’s gown, tethered to an IV pole, using the computer the nurse had left in my hospital room, with my wife, Lucy, an internist, at my side” (14). Paul looks at his own x-rays. He knew he had cancer. The irony of it is that instead of doing the diagnosing on a patient, he is the one who is being diagnosed.
“Dressed in a thin blue gown on a cold examining table, I described the symptoms to her” (15). Paul describes the symptoms to the doctor as a patient rather than having a patient describe their symptoms to him. Thus, the roles are reversed, which makes the situation ironic. Paul even picks up on this irony: “I received the plastic arm bracelet all patients wear, put on the familiar blue hospital gown, walked past the nurses I knew by name, and was checked into a room–the same room where I had seen hundreds of patients over the years” (22). Now, Paul is the patient.
Thus, Paul goes from being the doctor to the patient. He goes from giving the diagnosis to being diagnosed. He goes from reading patients’ x-rays to reading his own. He goes from white coat to blue gown. This shift is what creates irony in the memoir.
Ideas in Ink 