Interpreting a Cartoon Story Essay

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anxiety and happiness? Let us consider a joke on this topic, before turning to serious theoretical approaches toward the subject. In a "Peanuts" cartoon strip by Charles M. Schultz, the strip's resident know-it-all and amateur psychiatrist, Lucy van Pelt, is observing Charlie Brown's dog Snoopy hopping around in a giddy dance of happiness. "How can you be happy when you don't know what this year has in store for you?" she shouts. Snoopy looks chastened as Lucy continues, "Don't you worry about all the things that can happen?" Snoopy looks anxious, or sick unto death, as Lucy says: "That's better…live in dread and fear…be sensible." But in the strip's final panel, Snoopy bursts out into joyful laughter ("hehehe") and begins his happy dance again. I'd like to approach this cartoon strip as a little parable, and evaluate it using two approaches to anxiety: the existential approach given by Soren Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, and the psychoanalytic approach taken by Freud in Civilization and its Discontents.

Freud provides a useful starting place, because the Freudian concept of "angst vor etwas" or "fear before something" is precisely what Lucy van Pelt is trying to get Snoopy to feel in this strip. Freud famously claims that all anxiety is "angst vor etwas" -- in other words, it is not only confrontational (I stand before society / I stand before God and feel fear) but also anticipatory (I feel anxious before the event, my anxiety is an expectation) (Bloom 57). In Chapter VII of Civilization and its Discontents, Freud outlines the mechanism of how he thinks anxiety should operate in civilization. The earliest form is "social anxiety" where people feel fear before the opinion of others, and allow this anxiety to control them (Freud 85). Freud thinks this is the principle that organizes most of society, but he also believes there is a "higher stage" in which this anxiety and authority is basically internalized -- we respond to an inner sense of fear, the voice of conscience, rather than an external sense of social shame or social punishment for transgression.

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Part of the joke of the "Peanuts" comic is that, in some sense, it perfectly illustrates the dynamic of Freud's model. Snoopy is happy at the beginning: Lucy doesn't understand why. So Lucy subjects Snoopy to her opinion of his behavior, and Snoopy complies with "social anxiety" to alter his behavior accordingly -- he replaces his happiness with sorrow and worry. By the third panel, Snoopy seems to have internalized the source of anxiety, to reach the level Freud and Lucy Van Pelt recommend -- he walks away from Lucy, no longer needing social presence to awaken the fear that makes him conform. Yet in the final panel Snoopy has seemingly realized that his internalized conscience no longer supports the fear: Snoopy is happy again. From Freud's standpoint, this may just be a lesson about the short memories of dogs.

But is there another way that we can understand Snoopy's journey here, to pass through anxiety and be surprised by joy? I would suggest that the religious existential philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard provides an even better way of understanding Snoopy here. Kierkegaard presents his thoughts through the mask of a pseudonym, Johannes de Silentio. In some sense this is an old-style church sermon, taking a passage from the Bible and examining it closely. The text is the Genesis story of Abraham….....

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