The Leap : Existential Storytelling and the Knight's Perspective

‘The Leap: Existential Storytelling and the Knight's Perspective' is a creative writing PhD thesis. It consists of a science fiction novel which uses devices and ideas taken from existential philosophy, accompanied by a critical commentary. The protagonist of the novel is a young knight named Tirsan. The plot revolves around the knight’s quest to rescue the queen of his home country, who has allegedly been kidnapped by an evil wizard. Throughout the story, Tirsan struggles with the social and moral norms which have been instilled in him. Tirsan’s journey is a series of challenges to his preconceptions of what the world is like outside of the limited sphere in which he was raised. The setting of the novel is a future where, after a cataclysmic event, society has regressed into a pseudo-medieval culture. The critical commentary will discuss the literary and philosophical influences on the creative work, and the process of composition. The most influential thinkers from a thematic, philosophical and rhetorical perspective are Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Plato, and, speaking more broadly, existentialism. It will also situate the novel within its sphere of literary influence. Here, key writers are Italo Calvino and, again, Kierkegaard, who will be placed alongside a range of positive and negative exemplars as diverse as Johannes Brahms, Cervantes, Kazuo Ishiguro, George R. R. Martin, J.K. Rowling and Sophocles.