What is the relationship between grief and narrative?

ABSTRACT

In a recent article, Ratcliffe and Byrne (2022) propose a multifactorial phenomenological account of the influence of narrative on grief. Specifically, they argue that certain kinds of narrative can help navigate and negotiate the phenomenological disturbance of practical identity associated with bereavement. In this critical note, I identify and discuss two problems of their account. First, Ratcliffe and Byrne’s (2022) considerations rest on conceptually ambiguous distinctions between different narrative categories (the conceptual ambiguity problem). Second, their account appears to neglect the variability of both grief experiences and different kinds of narrative engagement (the variability problem). These problems need to be resolved to make progress in understanding the influence (if any) of narrative engagements on the phenomenology of grief.

KEYWORDS:

• Grief
• narrative
• narration
• phenomenology
• conceptual ambiguity problem
• variability problem

Acknowledgments

For helpful discussions, I would like to thank the members of the Attention, Narrative, and Self Reading Group in the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University and the Macquarie University Research Centre for Agency, Values and Ethics (CAVE), especially Mark Alfano, Jelle Bruineberg, Merril Howie, Ritsaart Reimann, Kate Rossmanith, and Annie Sandrussi. I am also grateful to an anonymous reviewer for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Australian Research Council [grant number DE210100115].

Notes on contributors

Regina E. Fabry

Regina E. Fabry holds a position as an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Awardee in the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. She specialises in philosophy of mind and cognition. In her current research, she explores the relationship between lived embodied experience and self-narrative, integrating work in philosophy, narratology, and the cognitive sciences.