PRATEEK BHANDARI 11C
GCSE ENGLISH COURSEWORK-
THE RED ROOM
Outline how HG Wells builds an atmosphere of tension and suspense in ‘Red Room.’
Tension means ‘the state or degree of being tense’ and suspense means ‘a state of anxious uncertainty.’ What we see is that when we are suspicious, we are likely to be tensed and when we are tensed we are tend to be suspicious, so these two words have relativity. ‘The Red Room’ by HG Wells, straight away gives us the feeling that the plot of the story will be based on mysteriousness and things that we will not imagine but would actually happen for e.g. ghosts. Another major point about this title is that when we read it, we instantly get questions in our minds for e.g. ‘what is the red room?’ or ‘why is it called the red room?’
Short story writers, especially mystery and horror, have to keep the attention of their readers all through. In most of these texts, readers would have noticed, writers building in more tension to make the story more interesting. After a while, once it has affected enough on the reader the tension would slowly decrease and come back to the normal level. Similarly one would observe in the first line of the ‘Red Room’ stating ‘I can assure you that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me’ with this first line the reader can straight away have the feeling that the story includes a ghost and the man saying it is the writer himself. As the story continues on the first page we are introduced to four characters, a young well educated man, an old man and his wife and another very aged man, but the interesting part is that we don’t come to know their names. The young man believes that the fact that the old red room is haunted is not true and is also keen to discover the reality of it. Where as the three old people have a completely opposite view point, they think that the red room is haunted and are afraid of going even near the room.
