THE SAID AND THE UNSAID: APPROACHES TO NARRATIVE ANALYSIS

ABSTRACT

Creating stories about events and lives is seen as a fundamental human ability, and the key way of constructing lives and selves, of personality and identities. Within health psychology, the focus of narratives is as a way of making sense of illness, of finding order and meaning in lives and selves destabilized by embodied suffering. As this interest in narratives has expanded, so has the variety of approaches to studying them. One concept that has been key in defining and analyzing narratives is that of coherence. The discontinuities and incoherence of narratives, in other words the narratives that do not fit into the expected order can be seen as a way of resisting and destabilizing dominant discourses that can be oppressive. Since the discontinuities in narratives are less often discussed, this paper illustrates one method of narrative analysis, Interpretative Poetics (Rogers et al., 1999), which acknowledges that the narrative is an attempt to create a coherent understanding of events and experiences, but also employs readings, which examine the places where coherence apparently breaks down through silences, gaps and negativity. Following four layers of analysis, this interpretative method unglues multiple voices of the said and the unsaid. As an example of this method, we present an interview with Nadya, in which we study the ways in which she comes to terms with childlessness. Her story contains what can be seen as examples of very subtle, implicit and most likely unconscious resistance to the existing dominant cultural discourses of childlessness.

KEYWORDS: Narrative analysis, Interpretative Poetics, childlessness.