What 30 classic novels look like when you graph their emotions
In 2005, Kurt Vonnegut gave a lecture at Case Western Reserve where he drew story shapes on a blackboard. The vertical axis was good fortune to ill fortune. The horizontal axis was the beginning to end of the story. With a few strokes of chalk, he sketched the emotional arcs that underpin most of Western literature.
"There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can't be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes."
— Kurt Vonnegut
He identified a handful of archetypal shapes: Man in a Hole (things get worse, then better), Rags to Riches (a steady climb), Icarus (a rise followed by a fall), Cinderella (rise, fall, rise again), and a few more. The idea was playful but prophetic — in 2016, researchers at the University of Vermont used machine learning to analyze 1,737 novels from Project Gutenberg and found that most stories do indeed cluster into six fundamental shapes.
I wanted to see this for myself. So I downloaded 30 classic novels — from Beowulf to The Great Gatsby — and measured their emotional trajectories using sentiment analysis. Below, you can explore the results: the emotional arc of each novel, the shapes they form, and what those shapes reveal about how we tell stories.
Select a novel to see its emotional arc. The curve traces the average sentiment — positive or negative emotional valence — as you move through the text from beginning to end. Peaks are moments of joy, love, triumph; valleys are passages of fear, death, despair.
Vonnegut's intuition holds up. When we classify each novel by the trajectory of its sentiment — does it rise? fall? dip and recover? — the 30 novels sort into six archetypal shapes:
Tragedy is the most common shape — stories that end lower than they begin. Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, Dracula, Dorian Gray: these are novels where the sentiment descends over the course of the narrative, ending in death, loss, or despair. The curve often has a long, slow decline punctuated by brief rallies.
Man in a Hole is perhaps the most satisfying shape — the protagonist falls into trouble, then climbs out. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Sherlock Holmes, War of the Worlds: the middle is darker than either end. Vonnegut called this the most popular story shape in Western civilization.
Icarus stories rise before they fall. Great Expectations climbs with Pip's fortune before crashing. Crime and Punishment begins with intellectual pride and descends into guilt. Metamorphosis starts with a family coping and ends with Gregor abandoned.
Rags to Riches is the simplest happy shape — a steady rise. A Christmas Carol is the purest example: Scrooge begins miserable and ends redeemed. The Call of the Wild traces Buck's transformation from pet to wolf.
Cinderella and Oedipus are the complex shapes. Jane Eyre rises (falling in love), falls (the fire, the moors), then rises again (reunion). Frankenstein traces the opposite: an initial fall, a partial recovery, then the final descent.
Overlay two arcs to see how different novels move through emotional space. Some pairs are surprisingly similar; others are mirror images. Try comparing A Christmas Carol with The Great Gatsby — they trace almost opposite paths.
Little Women is the most consistently positive novel in the set, with an average sentiment of 0.72 — nearly three times higher than the overall average. Louisa May Alcott's prose is warm with words of love, kindness, and happiness. At the other end, The War of the Worlds has the lowest average sentiment (-0.38), dominated by destruction, terror, and death.
The widest emotional range belongs to War and Peace — Tolstoy's epic swings between battlefield horror and domestic tenderness across its 580,000 words, covering more emotional ground than any other novel in the set.
Gothic novels (Frankenstein, Wuthering Heights, Jekyll & Hyde, Dorian Gray) cluster near a mean sentiment of zero — they balance moments of beauty against stretches of dread. Adventures (Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Call of the Wild) oscillate more wildly, with higher peaks and lower valleys. Psychological novels (Crime and Punishment, Heart of Darkness, The Yellow Wallpaper) tend to drift steadily downward.
This approach has real limitations. Sentiment lexicons work word-by-word — they see "happy" as positive and "death" as negative, but they can't understand irony, sarcasm, or context. When Jane Austen writes "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife", the lexicon sees "truth," "good," "fortune" — all positive — but misses the ironic bite.
The lexicon also has blind spots. Only 5-8% of words in a typical novel carry sentiment scores. The rest — articles, prepositions, proper nouns, archaic terms — are invisible to the analysis. This means the arcs are built from sparse data points, smoothed to suggest continuity that isn't really there.
And yet, the shapes are real. Despite the crude instrument, the emotional arcs of these novels match what any careful reader would describe. A Christmas Carol rises. The Great Gatsby falls. Jane Eyre rises, falls, and rises again. The macro-level emotional structure of a novel is robust enough to survive even the crudest measurement — which suggests that story shape is not a subtle, literary-critical construct but something fundamental to narrative itself.
Vonnegut was right. Stories have shapes. And those shapes are so strong that you can see them even through the blurry lens of word-level sentiment scoring. The shapes aren't in the individual words — they emerge from the accumulated weight of thousands of small emotional signals, the way a mountain range emerges from millions of grains of rock.
"The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper."
— Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country