When things go wrong

Links between narrative and identity have intrigued scholars from many fields, particularly that of medical humanities. Recently, the call for a “narrativization of healthcare” and for paying attention to patients’ narratives has had to face the limitations of the narrative form and the claim that one needs to go beyond narrative, even to free oneself from the impulse to narrativize, to grasp the fullness of illness and human experiences. In Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity (2016), Alasdair MacIntyre addressed criticism that suggested he had exaggerated the role of narrative, beginning with the idea of “things going wrong” with someone’s life. In this chapter, the author starts by discussing how this idea of “things going wrong” applies to experiences of illness in order to assess MacIntyre’s response to his critics. This will make it possible to address the disputes within the critical medical humanities about limits and potentialities of narratives with an enriched vocabulary from moral philosophy.