The narrator in “The Old Nurses Story” is the Nurse. The Nurse is telling the story to Miss Rosamond’s Daughter “Miss Rosamond (that was the baby, who us now your mother)”. It makes you feel as though you are the little girl, which makes you feel as though you are involved which means that the tension not only builds in the story but it builds on you. The narrator in “The Signalman” is a visitor who visits the signalman. It feels as though he is telling the story a lot after the events have happened. This makes you feel as though you need to be ready for a dramatic story.
The setting of “The Old Nurses Story” is in a hunted mansion which is one of the most popular settings for a ghost story. The Mansion is set in an old area, “old oaks. all white and peeled with aged”, this makes you feel that the place is hunted as soon as they arrive. The term “all white” in a ghost story gives you images of death and ghosts. In the Victorian times many houses were old and big because only the rich could afford houses so they made them as big as they wanted, due to no laws and masses of land. The setting of “The Signalman” is set on a train station. A train station is a very mood changing place. By this I mean, at one point of the day it is a very busy and energetic place but then at another point of the day it becomes a lonely, scary and ghostly place. The reasons it becomes a ghostly place is because there are many noises in a train station which can easily frighten a scared person.
The characters in “The Old Nurses Story” are either extremely nice people or conniving evil people. Straight away you get a sense if a person in this story is good or bad. The narrator in this story also acts as a part of the story, as the story is being told as a past experience. All this adds to the mystery of the story because you want to know why this Nurse is telling this story and why are these people being split into two group’s bad/good. The reason I find is that it is all there to sustain tension right to the end. So only at the end can you figure out why the Nurse has explained this story in this way. The characters in “The Signalman” are mainly just two people the Signalman and the narrator. The narrator plays a part in this story as the visitor who is always visiting the signalman. The two characters add to the mystery of the story because the signalman is always telling the narrator what happened to him, and the events that happen to him are always building tension and then in the signalman’s story to the narrator the tension always results in a dramatic scene “ the two sequences of the accident and the dead girl”, this is the signalman saying that he did not like the two dreadful tension building events that happened.
“The Old Nurses Story” has a slow paced plot. Which means it doesn’t reveal a lot until near the end of the story. A particular part of the plot, when the end comes ( describing the paragraph starting Just at that moment) the plot thickens and the girl wakes up and cries “ My little girl is crying” you realize that the storyline is now going to unravel and you will finally find out what has been happening. Then the noises happen “and filled our ears; we, too, heard voices and screams”. This makes you remember that the story has a ghostly plot and that the secrets are about to unravel. In comparison the plot of “The Signalman” has the ghostly effect throughout, because in the Victorian times they believed religiously that there were supernatural elements to the world, the signalman automatically thought that the strange voices he was hearing were supernatural.
To conclude I think that “The Old Nurses Story” creates and sustains tension by using the factor of true life story and by leaving many unanswered questions in your head that were to be answered in the end. So in comparison to “The Signalman” where the tension is not all released at the end, in this story the tension is created and released in small clusters. Therefore because these two stories were written in the early 1900’s the factor of ghosts and supernatural elements were always playing tricks on peoples minds and that was what happened in “The Signalman” it was just tricks on the signalman’s mind. So it was the factor of the setting, the person who was telling the story, the way they created there tension and the way that the stories were written that made the writing create and sustain tension.
