ABSTRACT
When illness is protracted, when there is no chance of return to the person one once was, or when there is no hope of being “normal,” a person’s very sense of self is lived in a special way through the body. Personal identity becomes intimately tied to the pain, uncertainty, and stigma that come with an affl icted body. What might it mean to be healed when a cure is only a distant possibility or no possibility at all? The inevitable poverty of biomedical responses to this question has a great deal to do with why narrative is so irresistible. Stories, told or acted, offer healing possibilities that reach far beyond the purview of biomedicine. They can help transform identity, interpret the meaning of the past and even provide images of possible futures. This narrative potential has spawned a wealth of scholarship on the relation of narrative, illness, and personal identity. (See, e.g., Bülow & Hydén, 2003; Becker, 1997; Brockmeier, 2002; Cain, 1991; Charon & Montello, 2002; Frank, 1995; Garro, 2000; Good & Good, 1994; Greenhalgh & Hurwitz, 1998; Hydén, 1997; Kleinman, 1988; Medved & Brockmeier, 2004; Monks, 2000; Morris, 1998.) But stories have insidious potential as well, closing down possibilities, cloaking power in the name of “stating the facts,” preventing the very changes that might lead to healing. The very form of stories may oppress, forcing a meaning that denies or overrides a chaotic or inarticulate personal experience. Kirmayer, for example, contends that the coherence that is part of a well-told tale can distance the sufferer from her experience of suffering. Stories can be vehicles for ideology making, especially when coconstructed with powerful physicians, producing texts that are, from the patient’s point of view, experience distant. Metaphors and “fragmentary stories, narrative strands” may be more revealing than a fi nely wrought narrative (Kirmayer 2000, p. 171). Unni Wikan (2000) also objects that sometimes stories present life in an overly coherent way and cannot necessarily be called upon when facing an unpredictable illness. It may even be that silences or half-told tales disclose more about what it is like to be fl attened by a serious and unexpected illness, to “fall out of one’s life,” as Gadamer (1996, p. 42) puts it.
