Authors Playing With Our Emotions

Authors Playing With Our Emotions in Robert Frost’s “The Fear”, Chuck Palahniuk’s “Speaking Bitterness”, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”

Some authors are very clever in the way they toy with our emotions. It is not uncommon to find yourself giggling at a story while simultaneously realizing you probably should not be laughing at something that is actually quite gruesome. These mixed emotions are stressful for a reader, and this anxiety is an author’s way of creating paranoia. Paranoia is a fear caused mainly by extreme anxiety, and in many cases the anxiety is a result of dissonant emotions that create tension. Robert Frost’s “The Fear”, Chuck Palahniuk’s “Speaking Bitterness”, Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”, and Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” all utilize dissonant emotions to cause stress for the reader. Frost and Palahniuk focus on the conflict between fear and a lack of reason for fear. Jackson and O’Connor focus on the dissonance between humor and gore, and also the conflict between a need to feel sympathy for a character and a lack of connection to said character. But there are also the fearless, bold, and strong-minded people. There are people who may not be affected by the tricky ways of these authors. However, they are the exceptions, and just because they do not feel it does not mean they are not supposed to. Despite these exceptional people, authors design their stories specifically to include the tension from dissonant emotions in order to elicit paranoia-related anxiety.

It is natural to want to identify the source of an emotion, so when authors create an overwhelming sense of fear without explanation, the reader experie...

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... author wants them to be guided. The paranoia aspect is a theme that the authors are trying to utilize as a means to a certain end of their choosing, and that is why they induce such anxiety in their readers. A sense of paranoia is elicited by the tension created by conflicting emotions.

Works Cited

Frost, Robert. “The Fear”. Robert Frost’s Poems. New York: St. Martin’s, 2002. 107-111. Print.

Jackson, Shirley. “The Lottery”. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 586-592. Print.

O’Connor, Flannery. “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”. The Story and Its Writer: An Introduction to Short Fiction. Ed. Ann Charters. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 1042-1053. Print.

Palahniuk, Chuck. “Speaking Bitterness”. Haunted. Chuck Palahniuk. New York: Doubleday, 2005. 258-268. Print.