Social Narratives, Socio-Narratology, and Illness Narratives -Focusing on Arthur Frank’s Theory and Narratives-

In this paper, based on the study of social narrative and social narratology, I studied Arthur W. Frank’s theory of socio-narratology and his personal illness narrative and his analysis of general illness narratives. Social narratives have common characteristics and criteria with literary narrative as a narrative itself, but it also has different characteristics from literary narrative in that it is a real narrative of reality, not a fictional narrative of literary art. From this perspective, narratology requires not only literary narratology but also social narratology. In this study, I dealt with the characteristics and core of social narratology, and then studied A. Frank’s social narratology. Based on this, I studied illness narrative as a social narrative, especially A. Frank’s illness narrative.BR/ In his theory of socio-narratology, A. Frank emphasized the social relationality and polyphony of social narrative, claiming that narrative not only reflects experience but also creates experience. He also emphasized dialogical narrative analysis as the practice of socio-narratology theory. From this perspective of social narrative, he narrated the story of his own illness experience as a social narrative and explored others’ illness narratives on the layer of textuality. He emphasized that his own illness narrative can play an important role as a social narrative and communicated his own illness experience well as a social narrative. He also divided people’s illness narrative types into restitution narrative, chaos narrative, and quest narrative and suggested additional possibilities for life-as-normal narrative.