Philoctetes and the Good Companion Story

The idea of a companion story is developed through an analysis of Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, about living in chronic pain. That story is anchored by an ethnographic report of a boy living with pain, and his companion story. The good companion story is distinguished by three qualities: it consoles its companion, it complicates lives that it enters, and it promises a form of hope. The article thus seeks to demonstrate the therapeutic capacity of stories to effect healing

The Limits, Dangers, and Absolute Indispensability of Stories

In October 2013, Arthur W. Frank presented the John McKendy Lecture in Narrative at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. The annual lecture, sponsored by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research on Narrative (CIRN), is named for John McKendy, PhD, a member of the Sociology Department at St. Thomas University and one of the founding members of CIRN, who died tragically in 2008. Dr. Frank has kindly agreed to have the video and transcript of his lecture published in Narrative Works. In his lecture, he presented stories from Bob Dylan’s memoir, a biography of Henry VIII, Tolstoy’s novel War and Peace, and Sophocles play Philoctetes, to demonstrate “not just how we make up stories, but how stories make up us.