title: A random blend: the self in Philip Larkin's poems "Ambulances" and "The Building".
abstract: In two of his great poems, "Ambulances" and "The Building," Philip Larkin considers a deep fear about human individuality. The fear is that the human self is contingent and disjunctive, lacking any integrity or unity. The arrival of an ambulance on an urban curb and a visit to the hospital are the occasion of reflection on this form of human fragility. But more significant, the ambulance and the hospital are imagined as contexts in which the contingency of the human individual is brought out and laid before us.
authors.affiliation: Bioethics Centre - Te Pokapū Matatika Koiora, Division of Health Sciences, 1st Floor 71 Frederick Street, Dunedin 9016, PO Box 913, Dunedin, 9054, New Zealand, neil.pickering@otago.ac.nz.
authors.forename: Neil
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Pickering
mesh_terms: D000552:Ambulances; D004532:Ego; D006760:Hospitalization; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D008093:Literature, Modern; D028723:Personhood; D011037:Poetry as Topic