Trusting the Author: On Narrative Tension and the Puzzle of Audience Anxiety

Some fictional narratives make use of certain kinds of tension in order to evoke anxiety in audience members. Why do we enjoy feeling anxiety in this context, even as we try to avoid it in others? In this paper I describe two kinds of narrative tension that are often utilized to evoke such feelings and investigate what makes the experience of these tensions enjoyable. I conclude that we enjoy narrative tension only when we feel a deep trust in the author. When this trust is lost, the experience is no longer enjoyable and the tension is judged an aesthetic flaw.