| Summary: | The article explores Katherine Anne Porter’s existential concerns reflected in her fiction. Applying the tools of biographical and historical criticism as well as textual analysis, the study delves into the disintegrating apocalyptic fictional world of the American South in the tumult of the Great War and the Spanish influenza that constitutes a mirror of the author’s own personal tribulations in the context of social and personal upheavals. Strands of Existentialism represented by both Christian and atheist thinkers have been adopted as a background against which Modernist anxieties could be best understood and analyzed. The recurrent motif of time with its elusiveness and relativity tends to combine the seemingly dissimilar voices of selected Existentialists, fictional characters and the author herself in their search for truth, identity and meaning, emphasizing subjectivity as the essential element of cognition. As human anxieties are impossible to be encompassed and cast in the clearly defined borders, spiritual concerns outlined in the article tend to remain a riddle open to a multitude of explanations. However, indirect and implied inclinations towards Christian theology alluded to both in the writer’s works and life suggest the adoption of a Kierkegaardian ‘leap of faith’ by the existential sceptic into an orderly essentialism of the Catholic religion as a solution to all anxieties and uncertainties of life.
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