Collective Narration and the Politicization of Climate Distress

This article examines how contemporary intergenerational climate fiction mobilizes narrative forms to transform climate distress from a private psychological condition into a socially and politically legible experience. Focusing on Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible (2020) and Imbolo Mbue’s How Beautiful We Were (2021), it argues that child focalization and collective narration are crucial to this shift. Both novels function as climate Bildungsroman, tracing young protagonists confronting ecological crisis and inherited political failure. While Millet’s novel foregrounds the emergence of a shared generational climate affect, Mbue’s mobilizes collective narration to expose uneven environmental harm and gesture toward a horizon of liberation.