The Pandemic Is a Chaos Narrative

“Chaos narratives, however, defy our narrative expectations. There is no order, sense, or logical chronology but, instead, suffering without an apparent purpose or meaning.”

In early 2019, I read “Illness and Narrative,” a keynote speech that medical sociologist and bioethicist Arthur W. Frank had delivered in his book The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics. Frank describes three types of narrative formats in which we can classify stories of illness: restitution, quest, and chaos narratives.

The restitution narrative is a simple and cognitively satisfying structure for a story. A healthy person becomes ill, receives treatment, then is healed and returns (or is restored) to the state of health enjoyed before the illness. In the quest narrative format, there is a call to action, the person undergoes suffering from his disease and/or treatment, and then, after a turning point, the person returns to health and is rewarded for his suffering. Often, this reward takes the form of a deep insight or learned truths that the formerly ill person gains to share with the world; these insights provide a reason for the pain. Even if the person is not restored fully to the state of health he enjoyed before, he has grown or transformed in some other way or accomplished his “quest,” which provides a source of meaning.

We like restitution and quest narratives because it is compelling and morally fulfilling when we are able to solve problems with ingenuity and diligence or when righteous heroes triumph and villains meet an end worthy of their amorality. This is especially true with medical problems, which obviously have high stakes and are emotionally intense.

Chaos narratives, however, defy our narrative expectations. There is no order, sense, or logical chronology but, instead, suffering without an apparent purpose or meaning. Resolutions and endings prove elusive, and the individual can do little to influence the plot—or, rather, the senseless sequence of events that stands in for a plot. Chaos narratives ignore our moral sensibilities at best and offend them at worst.