Disease as Alienated Narrative Discourse in Lisa Genova ’s Still Alice: Narrator as grand absentee or the precariousness of memory as we know it

Narrative and the narrator per se have been the concern of theorists and literary critics for the past few centuries, be it in literary criticism or in self-reflexive literary texts. What I am looking at in this paper is the very instantiation or absence of the overt narrator. Indeed – in the text under scrutiny here, the bestseller Still Alice by Lisa Genova, published in 2007 and now an Oscar-winning movie – the first person narrator, Alice is an absentee with a difference, as hers is not a covert absence, but an absence spawned by a medical condition, namely Alzheimer’s. A perusal of the text yields lapse of memory on the one hand and immediate gauche attitudes on the other hand. All this triggered by the terrible disease. As such, illness is not necessarily a new trigger in literature – see the science-informed literary texts of the nineteenth century, when indeed science soared and large audiences would be mesmerized by the newest advancement in science in popularization of science public conferences and this did not go unnoticed to the Victorian – generic – writer.