The Undertone Life Stories of Elderly People

Focusing on the Inconsistencies in Narratives about Family of an Elderly Husband and Wife

Abstract

　　The purpose of this paper is to clarify the significance of undertone life stories focusing on the inconsistencies in narratives about family of an elderly husband and wife. In the welfare state, law and money mediates lives of elderly people. We recognize a subject of elderly people in the discourses of active aging, well-being and ageless life. While, we also know that elderly people percept and feel emotions and memories in a different way from the welfare state system does. This paper focuses on undertone life stories of elderly people in order to pay attention to feelings (emotions and memories) of elderly people living in the welfare state. We focus on the concept of inconsistency (silence, unclearness, contradiction, incomprehensiveness and nondeterminativeness) in narrative approach and analyze undertone life stories of elderly people. While narrative approach defined undertone narratives as a break of consistency of self-story, this paper focuses on inconsistency as a viewpoint of analyzing undertone life stories. 　　We clarified two points. First, inconsistency suggests plurality of feelings. The inconsistency in the life stories of an elderly wife indicates that her loneliness expresses not only a sense of loss but also affections of grandmother for her grandchild. The inconsistency in the life story of an elderly husband indicates that his pain expresses not only a serious feeling but also appreciation for the irreplaceable father’s memory. Second, this paper reveals the problem of a relationship between inconsistency and feelings. We can see that inconsistency indicates plurality of feelings from a viewpoint of undertone life stories. Towards a study of elderly people’s realities of lives in the welfare state, we have to pay attention to the undertone life stories and to the plurality of feelings.