The opening paragraph of ”The Red Room” begins with a dialogue which creates tension to the audience because it’s straight into action in the middle of the conversation. It is written in first person narrative which is very effective because it makes it personal and immediate. It also refers to a “ghost” in the first line which creates tension and suspense. Other characters contrast with the narrator because they have individual features with no names just described like “the man with the withered arm”. Detailed description of characters without names creates a lot of suspension and makes want to read on. The narrator is the one spending the night in the room and he is confident. He uses repetition of the phrase ”it is your own choosing”. All these are very effective to be used in a story and the reader is puzzled as he doesn’t have the answers to his questions.
“The Red Room” and “Harry” uses different techniques in the first paragraph because they both start of using different structures. The Red Room starts of with a dialogue and Harry with a list of traditional things. As they both create suspense and tension for the reader making them want to read on.
The characters of “The Red Room” create suspense because they have no names and they are described as what they look like. The man who is staying in the house has confidence and he is not afraid because he says “I can assure you”. The man with the withered arm describes to the reader that he is weak and he has an injured arm. The old woman is described as having pale eyes. The old man has a stick that he walks with to give him support, he is ill and old. He walks funny with shambling steps, he was more bent, more wrinkled and more aged than the withered man. The old mans eyes were covered by a shade and his lower lip, half averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying yellow teeth. All the details of the characters are very effective because they have strange and ugly appearances as they are old.
“Harry” makes use of a lot of dialogue of the characters to inform the reader that there is a lot of description given about all the characters in “Harry” apart from Christine’s foster parents Mr and Mrs James. There is no description given about them. Most of the suspense is created when the repetition of the following words “children with red hair”, the name “Harry” and “white roses”.
Christine, the five year old girl with pale red hair and big blue eyes and her teacher “A pleasant young girl with fair hair and white linen dress” creates tension and suspense because they are the only ones that can see the ghost. “Harry” was a fourteen year old boy, skinny and all with red hair too and he is the real brother of Christine’s who is dead throughout the story because he had dies saving her life. The old women who lives near Christine’s old house where she was with her real parents and her brother sounded scary as she was described as having yellowish, blood shot eyes. The rest of the characters don’t really create any type of suspense because they are not involved in the story much. There is a lot of description about her real parents called the “Jones”. Their description was given because the reader won’t know anything about them and the history of Harry and how he died and why.
There are not a lot of characters in “The Red Room” because the whole story is located in the house and not anywhere else. Thus, if “The Red Room” had been set in different settings then there would be many more characters. The characters in “The Red Room” still created suspense and tension although their names are not mentioned, only the description of their appearances are described in detail.
In the story “Harry” there different settings with different characters involved in each setting. Some of the main characters that create suspense and tension are Mr and Mrs James, Christine, Harry, the teacher and the old woman.
In the story “Harry” there are lots of settings with lots of characters, some of which create tension and suspense. The opening paragraph starts of with a beautiful, hot day where Christine is playing in the garden making daisy chains. Normally gothic horror stories begin with a dull, cold atmosphere at night but in ”Harry” is started of in the daytime during the summer season and its creates tension to the reader. Suddenly Christine looks towards the bush of white roses and smiles. This is where the reader doesn’t know why she is doing what she is doing. Later on at the doctors surgery Christine tells her mother that “Harry” is waiting for her near the rose bush. It then strikes the reader that it has something to do with the rose bush. When “Harry” is mentioned even the “rose bush” is mentioned. The reader now expects something dramatic to happen.
The setting where Mrs James goes for her secret mission to ‘The Adoption Society’ creates a bit of suspense to the audience because she says “I hadn’t visited for five years”. The day Jim (Mr James) and I had gone to be given more information.
The settings of “The Red Room” has lots of description given because there is only one place. First it gives us detail on the house and it creates tension and suspense to the reader because it tells us that the house has got “echoing passage, a spiral staircase, corridors, old fashioned furniture’s”. This tells the audience that the story is old because it is set in an old house with old fashioned furniture’s.
On one of the paragraphs the details of “The Red Room” were given. There were candles suggesting that they used candles instead of electricity for light in the past. The word “shadow” was mentioned a lot stating that the house is a bit spooky. The castle was known as the Lorraine castle in which the young duck had died. “The Red Room” is described as a large room with shadowy windows, black corners and the furniture includes beds, windows, chimney, mirrors, a mantel shelf, china candles, an arm chair and a table. All these furniture’s suggest to the reader of the richness and first class but old fashioned. They also create tension because they are the things that the reader would expect in a horror story and the setting where it would be set.
“Harry” has loads of settings but not described in detail as “The Red Room”. It might be due to the fact that these places were that important as the story is nit based on them. The atmosphere of “Harry” is which suggests it is a summer season as “The Red Room” is all set at night time. The atmosphere of ‘The Red Room’ is cold because the fire place is lit and the other characters are drinking something hot.
“Harry” is not a gothic horror story because it doesn’t have the traditional ingredients like it starts off with a dull atmosphere like rain, thunder, dark and cold. It’s not situated in a big castle or a mansion but in a house with a family in the garden. It doesn’t have long sentences but they are shortened down. “Harry” has the main character which is the ghost “Harry” who is the central character.
“The Red Room” is situated in a big castle at night in a cold atmosphere. It has the central character and the use of language and individual words that create suspense and tension. It has long sentences to create a good effect depending on context and the main event which takes place at night.
The story I preferred was “Harry” because it was a modern gothic horror and I understood the use of language and words as they were not difficult to understand. “The Red Room” had long sentences and lots of words that were difficult to understand first time.
I thought that both the stories were successful at creating suspense and tension in both the stories. The only difference is nowadays people do not like to read gothic horrors, they prefer to read the modern stories which is the one I prefer.
