Narratives

“There are, however, tensions between the lived experience of illness and disability and the conventions that shape the representations of those experiences in published narratives. Narrative places particular constraints on embodied experience. . . . The limits and order of narrative expert pressure on the shaped of published accounts of illness and disability and, in particular, their resolutions or endings. . . . the generic happy ending is predominant in book-length illness narratives” (Garden, 122, 123). “The lesson for medical professionals is that a literal veracity, a one-to-one mapping of life onto representation, cannot be expected from illness stories. . . . What Being John Malkovich suggests is that even strictly ‘inauthentic’ stories are richly ‘authentic’ in their very idiosyncrasy; that even when they cannot be mined for facts, stories can be understood as meaning-making processes” (DasGupta, 448). . . . This more complicated vision of illness narratives supports the notion of the other’s unfinalizability – the impossibility of ever saying the last word, telling the final story – as well as the potential in true dialogue for always asking, telling, and hearing more, a potential that must be imagined and therefore understood by the listener” ( DasGupta, 456).