Abstract

In this article I argue that Moore treats the fictional purity of the story as a symptom in a psychoanalytic sense, just as the mother in the story treats her baby purity as a symptom. Using primarily Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Jacques Lacan, I show that both Moore and the mother hold on to the belief in the symptom’s efficacy even when the surrounding community is trying to get them to adapt other languages, in this case the respective vocabularies of autobiography and cancer. Moore’s story illustrates that the symptom is not something to be removed, but is in fact the imaginative element that allows the subject to function when faced with a traumatic crisis