The setting of these stories is very important. Readers use the setting to find out about the genre of the story. The old woman says “through that is a spiral staircase, and halfway up that is a landing with baize. Go through that and down the long corridor to the end, and the red room is on your left up the steps.” This describes a scary place. Powerful words such as “long corridor” and “spiral staircase” show a dark creaky house in our imagination.
The setting of The Red Room is an old house with a spiral staircase and creaking doors. Using this you can tell straight away that this is a typical horror story.
The setting of The Whole Town’s Sleeping, I thought, was odd. I thought this because it isn’t a typical setting like The Red Room. It is a small village far away from the city. Also the people that might live there might be people who are old and don’t have
family near by and there aren’t any kids playing on the street and there also might be people running away from their problems and want to be left alone. This might mean that not many people socialise with each other. Therefore people are alone and vulnerable and the reader knows that this builds tension.
The main characters in both texts are quite similar. The main character in The Red Room is very arrogant and self-confident. He says ‘that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me’. This shows him as acting strong and manly and as if nothing can scare him. This also shows arrogance in this character.
Also the old people that live there are important. This is because their age implies that they are closer to death and this might make the reader uncomfortable because the reader would expect that something is going to happen to them even though they are not main characters.
The main character in The Whole Town’s Sleeping is also very arrogant, vulnerable and she doesn’t believe the gossip going around. A quote that proves this one is she says ‘It’s early. The Lonely One won’t be out till late.’ and it says ‘Lavinia, as cool as mint ice cream’. This presents her as she always stays calm and she is trying to calm her friend down as well. The reader sees Lavinia as being cool and that she thinks positively.
Lavinia’s friend Francine is shown as a typical female character in a horror story. She is shown as being weak and scared. We know this because in the text she makes comments such as ‘lets run’ and ‘I’m afraid’ etc. This shows that she just wants to go home and lie in her safe bed and relax with no worries. Readers might worry about Lavinia because she is opposite to Lavinia and makes her stand out more.
In the Red Room H G Wells, I think, use language well to emphasis the genre, for example he mentions the word ‘ghost’ in the first sentence.
He uses language to make us feel frightened by using lexis to make a picture in the reader’s mind allowing the reader to pretend that he/she is the main character and so feel what they feel (empathy) for example the texts uses phrases like ‘Long corridor’, ‘Unnatural’ and ‘dark against the fire light’. This makes a picture in our mind and we know what is happening. This also makes us feel uncomfortable because we don’t know what to expect (it is unpredictable), so this makes us feel more scared and more questions go through our mind like ‘What will happen next?’ and ‘Are the old people at all involved with this?’ These kinds of questions makes the reader expect bad thing to happen.
This continues as he describes setting in more and more detail. This also helps build tension because he slows down the story a bit here and people can make a clearer picture in their mind so they feel for the character more.
The language also shows the class of the characters e.g. the man says word like ‘Tangible’ and ‘It’s my own choosing’. These words sound educated and rich, which then might indicate that this character is in the upper class of his time. This means that the readers already expect this character to be big headed and arrogant because he is shown as a stereotypical rich character.
In The Whole Town’s Sleeping, Ray Bradbury also uses language well but in a different style e.g. he describes things using unusual phrases, such as, the text says ‘There are two moons: a clock moon with four faces in four directions above the solemn black courthouse, and the real man that was slowly rising in vanilla whiteness
from the dark east.’ The effect on the reader from this quote is that the Lonely One is starting to become more of a clearer picture in the readers’ mind.
I also noticed he uses dark colours a lot e.g. ‘Purple’ and things like ‘Shade of porches’ and ‘Oven-baked sidewalk’. I thought these phrases were quite powerful
because dark colours are often used to make people get uncomfortable because dark colours mean danger and unexpectedness because when it’s dark you can’t see anything and you don’t know what to expect and possibilities go through you mind.
The structures of both stories are very different. In The Red Room, H G Wells changes the pace of the story to build tension e.g. he slows the story down a bit and where they were and then later on he makes it faster and this makes the reader feel terror and panic. For example when the candles starts to blow out he slow the story down by writing about each individual candle e.g. ‘I saw the candle in the right sconce of one of the mirrors wink and go right out, and almost immediately it’s companion followed it’. This slows down the story and then later on he starts running around in the dark looking for the key and this makes the story increase in pace. When the pace is slower the reader feels more calmed down in contrast to when the pace quickens the reader feels more excited and jumpy.
Ray Bradbury structured the story by building tension in different parts of the story. In these parts of the story, the tension doesn’t build much, such as when Lavinia visited the chemist, but near the end when Lavinia walks through the ravine after dropping Francine, the tension starts to build rapidly to a climax (the ending).
Both writers would have thought about the theme and genre before writing the piece.
The genre of both stories was horror. In The Red Room I think a theme was arrogance. I thought this because the story was showing that people who appear arrogant just might be hiding their true feelings. This shows this by the man actually feeling scared and showing his emotion and we knew but the characters didn’t, other than the man. This was the irony of the story that we knew more than the old people.
The theme of The Whole Town’s Sleeping was the same as The Red Room because both main characters had similar personalities by both being arrogant and so we would expect them to behave in similar fashions. When these characters took risks it made us feel more worried for them and we might suspect that they are the ones who are going to get hurt. The writers made us feel this way to create tension.
In conclusion both stories do have similarities and differences. The main factor is how they show fear. Personally I thought that The Red Room was less scary than The Whole Town’s Sleeping. I thought this because in The Red Room the tension wasn’t built to a climax which then might make the reader less interested and bored whereas in the other story I thought Ray Bradbury was more successful because the end was a climax which then would keep the reader more interesting and demanding more.
All factors which make a good story, i.e. structure, theme, characters and language were all used creatively to build tension in both texts.
These stories were similar by having the same genre, theme, type of character and aim of trying to scare the reader. The differences were different settings and different audience expectations depending on the time period. More people in the time The Red Room was written were uneducated, poor, unskilled and working class but a few of
them could read. There were close-knit communities with generations of the same family living in the same area, which meant that everyone knew everyone’s history.
People were very religious and had to move if they did anything seen to be ‘wrong’. People also believed in the Supernatural and they believed that they would be punished by god if they did anything wrong. This was reflected in the story.
The people in the time when The Whole Town’s Sleeping tended to be more literate. More people wanted to read realistic stories about people more like them. They were less likely to believe in ghosts and punishments by god.
The reason for these differences is that the writers were influenced by the time they were writing in and they knew what people wanted and believed in their time period.
