Narrative and identity in Alzheimer's disease: A case study

Abstract

In this case study, focus is on how persons with AD use their remaining linguistic and cognitive resources, together with non-verbal aspects of the storytelling event, as resources in communicating and negotiating their identities in everyday encounters. The results of the analysis, focusing on the telling of the stories, indicate that other aspects than the temporal and referential organization of the narratives has become important resources for the teller in establishing and negotiating identity. The telling of temporally discontinuous narratives does not appear to affect or disrupt the teller's experience of some sort of a continuous sense of self and identity but are probably more a problem to persons without this kind of diagnosis. Being afflicted by AD most likely leads persons to try to invent and use alternative communicative recourses in order to sustain factors like their senses of self and identities. For researchers this makes it important to try to base their analysis on the actual organization of the talk and to focus on the functions of various responses and utterances in the interaction. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.