Quotations and Fragments: The Limits of Narrative

In this chapter, I address how Cicely Saunders is less interested in narrative to communicate ‘total pain’ than in the evocative nature of quotations and fragments, including Mrs Hinson’s ‘all of me is wrong’. Notions that Saunders collected patient narratives are undermined by archival evidence of conversations in which she prioritises how patients express their pain in language over any sense of narrative unity or coherence. Using ideas from Romanticism, I examine how these shorter narrative fragments might counterintuitively evoke complex experiences of ‘total pain’ in a manner that becomes more affective as less context is given. Saunders’s interest in less-storied forms has implications for how professionals engage with their patients’ pain and for the open-ended forms of knowledge and care advocated by the holism of ‘total pain’. Quotations and fragments are means of bearing witness to the authority of her patients as experts of their own experience in the manner of narrative medicine but also of speaking loosely in a way that reflects the difficulty of expressing and understanding complex pain, particularly when someone is dying.