The History of Religions, Read as Fantasy: On the Construction of (Religious) Ambiguity in the Television Show Lost

With its intricate ‘mythology’, ABC drama series Lost invited for a wide range of religious interpretation. Starting off as a survivor drama, the show evolved into a fantastic epos, in which the pilot episode’s initial question “Where are we?” triggered reflections on ‘Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are we?’ and was finally passed on to the world religions. Against the backdrop of Tzvetan Todorov’s and Marianne Wünsch’s work on the fantastic, we translated literary scholar Wolfgang Iser’s aesthetic response theory into a tool for analyzing narrative structures of contemporary supernatural fiction. Taking storytelling and reception culture into account, it is shown how Lost uses the enactment of religion(s) to perpetuate structural ambiguity concerning the series’ genre. With this ambiguity reverberating on the religious traditions referred to, Lost suggested the history of religions as an extradiegetic analogue of the fantastic.