Defending a Narrative ‘Total Pain’: Narrative versus Narrating

In this chapter, I explore possibilities for a narrative interpretation of ‘total pain’ that avoids the criticisms set out in the previous chapter. Using Cicely Saunders’s interest in nostalgia, I suggest dying might represent a special case for thinking in narrative terms. Moreover, Saunders ignores issues of truth or long-term coherence in favour of the therapeutic benefit of the meaningful relational time facilitated by narrating. Rather than simply asserting control over the meaning of a terminal illness through the reconstructive process of narration, perhaps understanding ‘total pain’ in narrative terms should be seen in relation to the provisional processual act of narrating, which is phatic in the way it affirms the relation between the speaker and those around them in the moment of telling.