COVID-19 Narratives and Layered Temporality

Jessica Howell’s scholarly article, “COVID-19 Narratives and Layered Temporality” (2022), argues that dominant epidemic narratives—characterized by linear progression and narrative closure—fail to account for the complex, lived realities of illnesses like COVID-19. She contends that these traditional structures obscure the ongoing, fragmented, and recursive nature of illness, particularly for those experiencing long COVID. By contrast, speculative fiction and personal illness narratives offer “layered temporalities” (211), revealing multiple, overlapping temporal experiences that resist the reductive logic of onset, crisis, and cure. Drawing on postcolonial literary frameworks, Howell shows how such narrative forms challenge colonial and racialized assumptions embedded in biomedical discourse.

To illustrate this, Howell analyzes speculative fiction by Alejandro Morales and Tananarive Due, whose work constructs alternative temporal imaginaries that destabilize dominant epidemic scripts. These fictional interventions are paralleled by real-life illness accounts—such as oral histories and social media posts from COVID-19 survivors—that articulate cyclical, interrupted, and unresolved experiences of time. Together, these sources highlight the inadequacy of conventional narrative forms in capturing pandemic life and emphasize the political stakes of representation. Howell ultimately calls for a critical reorientation in medical humanities: one that takes narrative multiplicity seriously and acknowledges the need for storytelling practices that reflect the complexities of marginalized experiences and ongoing public health crises.