The Story of "I": Illness and Narrative Identity

A bench on Hampstead Heath, overlooking London. I feel a bit like Rastignac, at the end of Le Père Goriot, pompously challenging Paris from the height of Père Lachaise cemetery: "A nous deux maintenant." Even more like the neurologist Oliver Sacks, recounting, toward the end of A Leg to Stand On, his ascent to Parliament Hill, one of the highest spots on the Heath, after the abyss into which he had been hurled by a neurological "hole in identity" (186), following a leg operation. To tell a story, it would seem, is to model it on previous stories--a point made before me and to which I shall return later. I am writing in a period of relative remission--thereby probably lending support, almost against my will, to the phoenix metaphor I have stubbornly resisted in Arthur W. Frank's stimulating 1993 essay on illness narratives. To this too I shall return later.