![]() ![]() ![]() He sits or lies like a zombie, moved, dressed, and manicured by his mother, visually incarnating absence, blankness, and intellectual death. No longer in the least an intellectual, Leonard is totally wooden, inert. He cannot use an alphabet board because he has no movement in his fingers. In Penny Marshall's film version of Awakenings,2 released in 1990, Leonard is a very different figure. There is no suggestion that he is in a coma or "dead inside": his ability to write, to communicate by means of his board, assures the reader of that. ^Beyond the Ouija Board: Dialogue and Heteroglossia in the Medical Narrative* John Wiltshire In the case history of "Leonard L," the last of the narratives about patients that form the central core of Oliver Sacks's Awakenings, Leonard, lying paralyzed in bed, communicates with the outside world by means of "a small letter board."1 Though deprived almost totally of voluntary motion and speech by the effects of viral encephalitis, bereft of normal expressive capacity, Leonard has been able to continue to read, to write reviewsÂ-even, so one is told, to run the hospital's library. ![]() In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: ![]()
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