The postmodern experience of illness begins when ill people recognize that more is involved in their experiences than the medical story can tell. The loss of a life's map and destination are not medical symptoms, at least until some psychiatric threshold is reached. The scope of modernist medicinedefined in practices ranging from medical school curricula to billing categories-does not include helping patients learn to think differently about their post illness worlds and construct new relationships to those worlds.

(Arthur W. Frank "The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics")

The physical existence of the remission society is modem: the technical achievements of modernist medicine make these lives possible. But people's self-consciousness of what it means to live in the wake of illness is postmodern. In modernist thought people are well or sick. Sickness and wellness shift definitively as to which is foreground and which is background at any given moment. In the remission society the foreground and background of sickness and health constantly shade into each other. Instead of a static picture on the page where light is separated from dark, the image is like a computer graphic where one shape is constantly in process of becoming the other.

(Arthur W. Frank "The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics")

III people's storytelling is informed by a sense of responsibility to the commonsense world and represents one way of living for the other. People tell stories not just to work out their own changing identities, but also to guide others who will follow them. They seek not to provide a map that can guide others-each must create his own-but rather to witness the experience of reconstructing one's own map. Witnessing is one duty to the commonsensical and to others.
The idea of telling one's story as a responsibility to the commonsense world reflects what I understand as the core morality of the postmodern. Storytelling is for an other just as much as it is for oneself. In the reciprocity that is storytelling, the teller offers herself as guide to the other's self-formation. The other's receipt of that guidance not only recognizes but values the teller. The moral genius of storytelling is that each, teller and listener, enters the space of the story for the other. Telling stories in postmodern times, and perhaps in all times, attempts to change one's own life by affecting the lives of others.

(Arthur W. Frank "The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness and Ethics")