Transforming Suffering into Storytelling and Storytelling into a New Life

Abstract

Through the analysis of narratives on sorrow and pain, this paper attempts to verify the extent to which speakers find relief and internal resources to rebuild their lives within their own processes of narration. The reflections derive from two correlated experiences: (i) observing speeches of parents belonging to a group that supports grieving parents and (ii) the fact that the researcher had the opportunity to act as a ghostwriter of an unusual story. My conclusion makes a few considerations on how these narratives can be deemed speech acts with curative effects that can promote life and reconstruct identities and how they act independently within the enunciative process. Austin’s (1975) speech act theory is the main theoretical prospect adopted with debates about identity and reflections over the relations involving language, literature, narrative, and health promoted by GENAM.