Suspense is created at the start of The Red Room when the narrator is actually confident but towards the middle and the end, he gets extremely cautious and afraid as he approaches the notorious red room. The suspense gets even greater when the narrator gets to the door of the red room.
“I entered, closed the door behind me at once, turned the key I found in the lock within, and stood with the candle held aloft, surveying the scene of my vigil the great red room of Lorraine Castle, in which the young Duke had died.”
This is when the tension of the narrator starts to boil over when he starts to enter and explore the room and he suddenly develops psychological problems. This is because the evidence of the story suggests that the narrators mind starts playing tricks on him.
“The shadow at the alcove at the end in particular had that indefinable presence, that odd suggestion of a lurking living thing, that comes so easily in silence and solitude.”
This quote would certainly stimulate the readers mind into thinking this can’t just be it, something will have to happen. I think when I read the story; a ghost would probably appear and scare the living daylights out of him. But no, Wells prefers to build the tension up and then let something totally unpredictable happen, or a totally new idea of how to scare someone.
The Red Room is a gothic story with genre and its purposefully short. The actual room is set in the old derelict castle with three old people, two men and an old woman. At the start the narrator is brimming with confidence because he doesn’t believe in ghosts.
“I can assure you that it will take a very tangible ghost to scare me.”
This statement suggests he is confident but as he goes through the house and gets to the door, this is when he gets more tense and scared. This tension and suspense is similar to The Tell-Tale Heart where the main character, who’s the murderer, goes into the old man’s bedroom every night at midnight and just stares at his gleaming eye (suspected to be a glass eye) waiting for the right moment of the night to murder the old man and rid of his devilish eye.
I will now move onto the structure of The Tell Tale Heart and compare the similarities of both the short stories, the story be about a man who doesn’t like an eye. The author, Edgar Allan Poe, has put the story together by setting it in just two rooms, the living room and the old man’s bedroom. The old man’s bedroom is the set of the main part of the story, as that is where the actual murder takes place.
Poe engages readers by creating mirrors and mirrors of suspense in the Tell Tale Heart. This catches the reader’s eye because when they read it they will just want to read on and on.
There is plenty of comparisons in the two stories, those being that the suspense and tension are both brilliantly written by the two famous authors and the point in The Red Room about the candles going out or the point in its counterpart The Tell-Tale Heart when the policeman come at the end investigating a breach of peace, both have suspense at the end.
The setting chosen by Wells in The Red Room is cleverly used to frighten, excite and make the readers anxious. There are hundreds of spiralling staircases and passages in Lorraine Castle, sprawled in darkness that is trapped in corners of rooms. Also the narrator indicates to us the creaking doors and floorboards every time someone walked into a room or upon the floor.
“I heard the sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the passage outside, and the door creaked on its hinges as a second old man entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first.”
This is indicating that the man came in and asked the narrator if he was really sure of what he was about to do. I think Wells chose this setting because all the spirals and staircases are probably dark and really spooky if you were on your own, again making it really tense for the readers.
The setting is typical of a gothic setting because the style of this building was common in the 12th-16th centuries, with pointed arches and much decoravitive carving. This would mean that Victorian audiences would “feel at home” in a way and that would mean they’d probably enjoy it more.
The setting adds suspense in the story mainly because it is so big and dark.
The Tell-Tale Heart’s setting is extremely different compared to The Red Room because in Poe’s story, we know nothing about the setting. I think Poe didn’t think it necessary to describe his setting because he wanted his readers to use their imaginations for themselves. I don’t think it really makes a difference to the suspense because, in my view, if you can write then you can do whatever you want in a story.
The Red Room has marked differences in the style of Wells compared to Poe. This difference is in the suspense. The Red Room’s language is built up in brackets. The suspense is built up in the language by the candles in the tomb suddenly being blown out for no apparent reason. “It was after midnight that the candle in the alcove suddenly went out, and the black shadow sprayed back to its place there.”
In conclusion, the supernatural presence and descriptive writing wins The Red Room over The Tell-Tale Heart for me and without the description, I feel the story would be boring and pointless. The Tell-Tale Heart is good but I lost the plot a bit and just wondered at the end why did he tell the policemen. But, if there was more descriptive writing and if I used my imagination more, i'm sure the story would be very good.
By Tom McCance
