SOURCE: Banks, Joanne Trautmann. “Death Labors.” In Literature and Medicine: Volume Nine, Fictive Ills: Literary Perspectives on Wounds and Diseases, edited by Peter W. Graham and Elizabeth Sewell, pp. 162-71. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Banks compares the portrayal of illness in Tolstoy's novella and Tillie Olsen's “Tell Me a Riddle.”

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. 

—T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

They look so different on the page, these two seemingly similar stories.¹ Tolstoy's paragraphs are long, his sentences complete and declarative, his words richly abundant. His page is filled in. In contrast, Olsen works with empty space as if it were as important an element as language. Many of her sentences are fragments, italicized, parenthetical. These are not only...