Wyczerpanie. O kondycji bohaterek narracji maladycznych

Abstract

This article deals with chronic fatigue, one of the characteristic features of contem-porary illness narratives written by women authors. First, it focuses on Małgorzata Ba-ranowska’s To jest wasze życie. Być sobą w chorobie przewlekłej [ This Is Your Life: How to Cope with a Chronic Illness], a story of her own life impaired by SLE (systemic lupus erythe-matosus). The descriptions of her experiences (the disruption of her daily life caused by chronic pain and her attempts make sense of it) provides a frame for the reading of other narratives, Anne Boyer’s The Undying and two journalistic texts on endometriosis, one by Dr Katarzyna Szopa and the other by Dr Karolina Wigura. The article defines chronic fatigue as a social condition which combines a resistance to regenerative therapies with the stress of having to act in demanding situations of real life. The precarious condition of exhausted bodies hovering between a life fully lived and a debilitating morbidity is compared with Byung-Chul Han’s philosophy developed in The Burnout Society and The Palliative Society: Pain Today (originally published in German in 2010 and 2020 respec-tively).