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Happiness of the Sick

Summary/Abstract: The central problem in Géza Gárdonyi’s short novels is the following poetical principal: “a novelist must seek for the character-creator thrill – the trouble, misery, difficulties, and exigencies that distress the character’s substance” (Gárdonyi 1974, 77). In Gárdonyi’s short novel titled Ki-ki a párjával [Every Jack Will Get His Jill] (1918) the exigency is the tuberculosis. The narration analyses the acts of humans suffering from deadly disease. As the corporal disease becomes the allegory of the destruction of interpersonal relations in the text, the novel is turning to analyse the deformations of the soul. But the most dynamic semantic extension of the text is based on the production of the metaphors of tuberculosis and lungs that goes far beyond the allegoric meaning. In my essay I would like to reveal the mechanism of those metaphoric processes that produce the figural counterparts of the main characters affected by tuberculosis.

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