Rohinton Mistry’s Vulnerable Aesthetic: Health, Illness, and the Body in Such a Long Journey

Recent theorizations of narrative empathy, narrative medicine, and cosmopolitanism have stressed how literature transmits and makes intelligible the lived experiences of others. Representing a family confronting mysterious illnesses, disabling injuries, and deaths, Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey instead stresses how narrative transfigures these experiences. Refusing to dismiss Mistry’s fixation with illness as either metaphor or manipulative sentimentality, this essay argues that Mistry’s representation of bodily precarity in patterned realist texts suggests a vulnerable aesthetic that, in risking failure, emphasizes how aesthetic forms transmit and transfigure experiences to prompt an examination of sentiment and offer interpretative choices for readers.