Authors Playing with Our Emotions in “The Fear” by Robert Frost, “Speaking Bitterness” by Chuck Palahniuk, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, and “A Good Man” Is Hard” by Flannery O'Connor find “Some authors are very clever in the way they play with our emotions. It's not uncommon to find yourself giggling at a story and at the same time realizing that you probably shouldn't be laughing at something that's actually pretty creepy. These conflicting emotions are stressful for a reader and this anxiety is the author's way of creating paranoia. Paranoia is a fear caused primarily by extreme anxiety, and in many cases anxiety is the result of dissonant emotions that create tension. “The Fear” by Robert Frost, “Speaking Bitterness” by Chuck Palahniuk, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson, and “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor all use dissonant emotions to cause stress in the reader. Frost and Palahniuk focus on the conflict between fear and the lack of reason to fear. Jackson and O'Connor focus on the dissonance between humor and gore, and also the conflict between the need to feel sympathy for a character and the lack of connection with said character. But there are also fearless, bold and strong-minded people. There are people who may not be affected by the complicated ways of these authors. However, they are exceptions, and just because they don't feel it doesn't mean they shouldn't. Despite these exceptional people, the authors specifically design their stories to include tension resulting from dissonant emotions in order to arouse anxiety related to paranoia. It's natural to want to identify the source of an emotion, so when authors create an overwhelming sense of fear without explanation, the reader experiences...... middle of paper...... the author wants them to be guided. The paranoid aspect is a theme that authors try to use as a means to achieve a certain end of their choosing, and this is why they induce so much anxiety in their readers. A sense of paranoia is aroused by the tension created by conflicting emotions. Works Cited Frost, Robert. “The Fear”. Poems by Robert Frost. New York: St. Martin's, 2002. 107-111. Print.Jackson, Shirley. “The Lottery”. The story and its writer: an introduction to short fiction. Ed. Anna Charter. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 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. Anna Charter. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin, 2003. 1042-1053. Print.Palahniuk, Chuck. “Talk about bitterness.” Haunted. Chuck Palahniuk. New York: Doubleday, 2005. 258-268. Press.