Ghosts of our Lives: a Hauntological Reading of Multiverse Fiction in Contemporary Verbo-Visual Media

This article explores the multiverse as a recurring narrative and symbolic configuration in contemporaryverbo-visual media. It interprets it as the articulation of a hauntological condition, shaped by the erosionof ontological certainties regarding the present and the past, along with the collapse of future possibilities.Tracing the concept’s trajectory from philosophical speculation and theoretical physics to a comparativeanalysis of comics, television, and contemporary cinema, the article asserts that multiverse fiction servesas both a consequence and a narrative response to the crisis of temporality, identity, and futurability inlate capitalism. Drawing on the idea of hauntology, we investigate how multiverse fiction has transformedfrom a speculative trope into a complex framework for navigating cultural anxieties associated with theinstability of truth, media fragmentation, and ecological crisis. The article asserts that multiverse fictionfacilitates narrative negotiations of unrealised presents and foreclosed futures, serving both as a product anda critique of post-postmodern temporal dislocation. Rather than providing resolution, it thus functions asa compromise formation mediating between escapism and critical engagement, creating speculative spacesfor mourning, reimagining, and symbolically rehearsing alternative realities.