the red room

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Alexander De Bacci                25/08/2007

By what means does HG Wells create an atmosphere of terror and suspense in The Red Room?

The Red Room is a short story written by HG Wells in which he uses lots of narrative and descriptive writing to create characters that are terrifying and a narrator that creates suspense. This story is written the 19th century and so many of these techniques are relatively new. HG Wells uses these techniques to create terror and suspense in The Red Room. I am going to discus the use of language, the description and the characters within The Red Room.

Wells uses terrifying words such as “monstrous” and “shadowy”. He carries this style on in the characters which he creates; describing a custodian as “The man with the withered arm” also mentioning the man with the “shade” and describing his eyes “small, bright and inflamed.”

        The narrator in the story creates suspense as he is overconfident and arrogant at the beginning of the story: “…it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me.” Yet by the end of the story he befriends the “grotesque custodians” and realises that the red room is in fact haunted by “black fear”.

        Not only does Wells use terrifying language, he also sets the setting through the narrator, we realise that the Narrator is very well educated as he uses complex words such as, “tangible”, “grotesque” and “custodians”. In some ways this makes you dislike the narrator and so you want him to get a fright, creating suspense. In the red room the narrators language goes from being very “matter-of-fact”, to being very emotional; this change in language is what makes you feel comfortable, because he is comfortable and then he loses this “matter-of-[fact ness]” and so it creates something terrifying. Wells can manipulate and emphasise this change which also creates terror and suspense. The narrator believes that he is more mature than the “custodians” because he seems to have been brought up in a very upper-class fashion, When he mentions that he has been alive for “eight and twenty years” the “three old pensioners” seem to look down on him as is shown when the “old woman staring hard into the fire” says “and eight and twenty years you have lived and never seen the likes of this house I reckon. There’s many things to see, when one’s still but eight-and-twenty.” You can tell that they are not very interested in him being there as they “[stare] hard into the fire” and “[sit] down clumsily and [begin] to cough.” The fact that they ignore him would seem to make him feel insignificant, but because he is so arrogant he does not feel this way. Even after being told that he is effectively naïve he does not lose this confidence.

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        The other characters have unusual anatomy creating disgust and fear as the narrator says they are “atavistic”. The fact that we never find out the names of any of the characters, which means that we feel uneasy, builds suspense up throughout the story. We learn throughout the opening of the story he does not like “senility” and that there is something “inhuman” in old age. “The man with the withered arm” repeats “Its your own choosing” four times which is somewhat unnatural; the reader feels terror and suspense from this because it is not a very natural sentence to be ...

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