PART I: NARRATIVE KNOWLEDGE: CHAPTER 3: LIKE AN OPEN BOOK: RELIABILITY, INTERSUBJECTIVITY, AND TEXTUALITY IN BIOETHICS.

This article argues for an emergent theory of narrative bioethics based on two voices and two disciplines--literary theory and textual reasoning in philosophy. If literary studies have the power to inform decisions in bioethics, it is because the knowledge of the self and others entered through the serious engagement with stories in literature is pivotal in thinking about case stories in ethics. Literature's narrative ethics examines the reciprocal responsibilities incurred by the writer who encodes thoughts and feelings into language and by the reader who rescues from words their secrets. Writer and reader (or teller and listener) develop deep powers and daring intimacies as they meet in text, for the writer, however cannily or uncannily, reveals aspects of the self while the reader, with whatever skill is available, penetrates the text toward that which put it into motion. This literary brand of narrative ethics guides the textual actors toward mutual respect and comprehension while governing the potential for exploitation or expropriation whenever one opens oneself to penetration by another. Like reading stories in literature and reasoning after the book is closed, reasoning about case stories in bioethics relies on the claim--at least the provisional claim while within the text's presence--that the world of the other is true.