Illness as an Occasion for Story Telling: Social Influences in Narrating the Masculine Self to an Unseen Audience

Abstract

This paper is an analysis of the testicular cancer video diary of a man whose pseudonym is Cal. Although there are many analytic pathways one could take the focus here is on how the ‘imagined audience’ influences the presentation of identity in his illness story. In one sense this video diary is a personal record of one man’s struggle with cancer but, although the video diary was made by himself and for himself, there is evidence of an ‘unseen and unspecified audience’ throughout. In Bakhtin’s terms there is a dialogical framework. It is suggested that a consideration of this ‘audience’ is significant in that it indicates culturally appropriate ways of telling illness stories