Bioethics, death and fiction

Abstract

The narrative has a determinant role in the relationship patient-doctor-illness. To put oneself in doctor or patient or illness’ position, and the context itself, represent a full source of understanding of the unbalance, of the lack of health and the possibilities in the explanation of pain and the experience in illness and death. The metaphors given to the literature or other forms of narratives, offer the possibility to visualize the role of bioethics, the agents and participants in the health alteration process and the process itself. The narrative and the esthetics fictions as mediations in the healing and care imagine some basic elements about which is established the communication, the dialogue and the context between the healers, the carers, the patient, the illness and death. The metaphor to put oneself in somebody’s place even in the personification of the illness, the memory or the death empower the elimination of barriers, provide the possibility of an impartial analysis and suggest the necessity of promoting a narrative competition in the participants agents in the process.