Abstract

HAMUI SUTTON, Liz. The narratives of suffering: a window on social reality. Cuicuilco [online]. 2011, vol.18, n.52, pp.51-70. ISSN 0185-1659.

Narrating is a fundamentally human way of giving meaning to experience. Both in expressing and in interpreting the experience of suffering, narratives mediate between the inner world of thoughts and feelings and the outer world of observable actions in addition to the particular status of the situations. Creating or listening to stories are active and constructive processes that depend on personal and cultural resources. Narratives can become powerful tools of learning and thus advance the understanding of other contexts and facilitate the understanding of something that has not been personally experienced. For the listener, a story sets in motion a search for possible meanings, so the narrative is co-constructed between the world of the story and the story of the world in which the narrative takes place. Exploring the narrative as a theoretical construct provides a broad framework within which to consider what happens in these private accounts. This article aims to reveal narratives as modes of thought that arrange experience and construct realities in dealing with intentions, actions, vicissitudes and the consequences of their course. The aim is to provide a theoretical framework through which to understand the discursive aspects of health and illness, without specifying concrete situations or particular experiences.

Keywords : narratives; social action; thought processes; experience; illness; subjectivity.

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