Storytelling of a Virus: A Focus on COVID-19 Narratives of Older Adults

Abstract

International audience ; The global COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak overwhelmed the world in 2020. The unprecedent pandemic situation, elicited by the invisible virus SARS-CoV-2, shattered people's usual benchmarks and representations of reality. Storytelling proliferates in times of crisis because this universal phenomenon allows people to structure the shapeless reality via meaning-making processes, and therefore to cope with the collective upheaval that represents the COVID-19 outbreak. The current research aims to investigate the storytelling underpinning the social construction of the invisible virus, conveyed by written and oral narratives of older adults. The automatized qualitative data analyses of older adults' written narratives (N = 144) demonstrated that the virus represents serious danger of sickness which arouses negative emotional reactions and the duality of life and death. The analyses of older adults' oral narratives (N = 26) demonstrated that their storytelling tends to anchor the biological functioning of the virus, which remains a mystery and a source of various fears, fantasies and fascinations. Furthermore, the "war metaphor" and martial rhetoric that emerged in the storytelling of older adults indicate a shared pool of knowledge that resonates in line with the COVID-19 mass media and political storytelling in France. Indeed, older adults' storytelling is anchored within specific spatio-temporal dimensions, as every extreme situation occurs within a particular time and space. Thus, the storytelling of a virus, that should be apprehended as a journey of meaning, demonstrates a hidden coherence and a collectively shared base of COVID-19 narratives.