Narratives

“The operation and influence of both personal motivational bias and existing meta-narratives are crucial qualifications to our understanding of patient narratives because otherwise it appears as though people are ‘just telling their stories.’ In fact, they may be telling stories that they feel motivated to tell in order to be perceived as ‘good’ patients or commendable individuals; or they may end up availing themselves of idealized, culturally accessible plots that represent how things should be (a kind of societal wish fulfillment) as opposed to how they actually perceive things to be (Shapiro, 69). . . . Within the academy, transgressive, boundary-violating, defiant counter-narratives are championed [but] Contestation and opposition do not automatically constitute more valid criteria for ‘truth,’ reliability, authenticity or trustworthiness than other authorial stances. A brutal, unremittingly ugly narrative is not necessarily a more ‘real’ narratives than a transformative one” (70). . . . Patients’ cv narratives themselves are not simplistically one thing or another – not entirely an act of rebellion against confining prevailing norms, nor an exercise in crafting a positive image for posterity. All stories necessarily contain elements of both authenticity and inauthenticity, are always partly trustworthy and partly untrustworthy, to some degree are unavoidably self-representations and performances. However, as consumers and necessarily evaluators of narrative, the unconscious biases and predilections of clinicians and scholars, whether in one direction or another, may diminish their capacity to complicate and fully appreciate the stories they hear and read” (70).