Examples of Fight/Flight/Freeze in Literature

Example 1- A joke

Here is an example of someone’s Fight response kicking in, causing them to make a split-second decision, from a sad joke I heard a while ago. In the joke, there is a guy who has a wooden eye. He is at a school dance but he doesn’t have anybody to dance with. Someone with a wooden leg comes up to him, and the guy with the wooden eye says, “Do you want to dance with me?” The person with the wooden leg says, “Would I? Would I?!” 

The guy panics and shouts, “Peg leg! Peg leg!”

(If you don’t get the joke, the person he wanted to dance with said “Would I” and it sounded like “Wood eye” to him, so he thought he was being made fun of.)

This is a good example of the guy’s Fight response kicking in. He was probably feeling very self-conscious about his eye already, added to the stress of being at a dance and not being sure who to talk to. All that stress built up, making him hear something that wasn’t actually said, and it triggered a retaliation.

Example 2- Warrior Cats

Now, here is an example of the Flight response, taken from the book series Warriors. In the book Sunrise, the character Hollyleaf has killed her Clanmate, Ashfur, because he threatened to tell the truth about her parents, who are from two different Clans. The pressure built up immensely for Hollyleaf, and so, eventually, it was too much and she told the truth to all of the Clans. She then confronted her true mother, Leafpool, and promptly fled the forest. This is a great example of Hollyleaf’s Flight response kicking in. She didn’t know what to do, and she couldn’t bear the intense pressure and scrutiny of every cat, so she simply fled the forest. It was a basic instinct.

Example 3- Small Spaces

Here is an example of the Freeze response kicking in, taken from the book Small Spaces by Katherine Arden. In one scene, Ollie, the protagonist, is crossing a bridge, and suddenly she freezes. Her mother died in a plane crash, and since then she has been wary of heights. She gets a flashback of her mother in this moment, and she finds that she can’t move. Her friend Coco has to come and guide her to the other side of the bridge, at which point she unfreezes. This is an example of Ollie’s Freeze response kicking in. There was a tense situation in which she needed to make a decision immediately, and she just froze up.