ABSTRACT
Susan Sontag’s short story “The Way We Live Now,” first released in The New Yorker in 1986, told a harrowing but heartfelt story at the center of the AIDS crisis, charting the trajectories of the friends of a man who may or may not be dying from AIDS himself. In the process, Sontag’s treatment of time, space and narrative is extraordinarily fluid, utilizing point of view and dialogue in incredibly poignant ways to inject a sense of understanding and empathy towards alternative sexuality at a time in American history when homosexuality and AIDS was being treated as ...