IT'S GOING TO BE OKAY. IT WILL: Depicting human experience that oscillates between reality and virtuality in a novel.

The social media revolution has created a social paradigm shift in which virtuality has inter-penetrated reality for its users. Human experience now oscillates between the virtual and real worlds we inhabit. For the novel as a literary form to remain relevant to digital natives who have only known a world with the Internet, novelists need to experiment with aesthetics, structure and tones to better represent and interpret their virtual-real experience of what it means to be human in the 21st century. In response to this challenge, my novel It’s Going To Be Okay. It Will., thereby explores the potential, and potential limitations, of narrative fiction to perform the task of representation. The architecture of the novel comprises three first-person narratives that sit within modernist literary conventions, as well as postmodern fragmented and non-linier narration in the form of digital communications or online artefacts, in order to better reflect a lived experience that is both virtual and real. By experimenting with this literary structure, the novel’s central thematic question asks, how do we understand ourselves, and locate ourselves, in the Internet age?