This excerpt, the opening of Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, is the reading sample from question 2 of CliffsAP English Language and Composition by Barbara V. Swovelin, which asks the student to analyse the use of metaphor and the author’s attitude towards metaphor. In this book, Sontag, having herself undergone lengthy treatment for breast cancer (which is not actually mentioned in the book), argues that the treatment of illness as a metaphor is harmful because (1) it contributes to stigmatization of the ill and (2) it gets in the way of focussing on the practical scientific aspects of dealing with disease. She herself, of course, in talking about kingdoms and passports uses metaphors to magnify the divide between the sick and the well, doing what she is putatively condemning.