Hope in Horrible Imaginings: A Study of Anxiety in Narrative Experience

Abstract

Anxiety is an emotion most people can identify and describe, yet the components of the experience itself require deeper investigation and unpacking. This thesis uses narrative structures, sequential recountings of events over time, as a method of analysis. Narrative arcs enable one to examine connections over time and track how emotions unfold, intensify, and resolve. Three narratives, Shakespeare’s Richard II, Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, are examined as case studies of anxiety. Explorations of these narratives, alongside historical and developmental considerations, help reveal the essential features of anxiety and the distinction between “normal” and “disordered” anxiety. Anxiety is shown to be a distinctly temporal emotion involving components of fear, desire, expectation, and uncertainty. The last feature, uncertainty, suggests that there are elements of hope in anxiety.