ONCOLOGY AND NARRATIVE TIME

Oncologists encounter the uncertainty of time horizons in their patien ts' lives. Although American oncologists are given a cultural mandate to instill hope in the therapeutic narratives they create with patient s, uncertainty leads them to expressions of time without horizons or o f time with highly foreshortened horizons as they seek to create for p atients an experience of immediacy rather than of chronology. The dist inctiveness of the American pattern is highlighted through comparison with Japanese exemplar cases and stories of therapeutic practices in o ncology. Concepts drawn from narrative analysis of temporality and the construction of the therapeutic plot are employed.