This Thesis examines how the emergence of a certain kind of cultural anxiety becomes intertwined with hauntological and phenomenological concepts, which reveals deeply rooted paradoxes in the way we construct fictional narratives. To achieve this, the thesis examines the narrative underpinning of the above-mentioned concepts in A. S. Byatt’s Booker Prize winner novel Possession: A Romance, viewing them through the lenses of various continental philosophical discourses. The method being the arrest of images to reveal in them fundamental contradictions, not in order to solve them but to showcase that they are essential to the function of the narrative that is built up from them. The conclusion of the thesis reveals that the narrative’s chief paradox is the impossibility of the permanent fulfilment of desire, which leads to rising tensions and thus, to cultural anxiety.