When I was looking at the word "suspense," most of the explanations I found were very much related to the two stories I had been studying. It holds your interest, it keeps you wondering, and it has a state of uncertainty. The Signalman and The Hound Of The Baskervilles definitely kept me asking questions and they also kept my interest extremely well.
The story that I will be studying first is ‘The Signalman’, by Charles Dickens.
After reading The Signalman, I firstly noticed that throughout the story Dickens uses suspense to get the reader to experience different feelings. One of Dickens' methods is to introduce suspense into the initial phrase; "Halloa, below there" This adds depth; we know now that someone is high up and another is down below. This opening sentence is a special one as it sets the scene, and as we probably already knew, before we read the story, there is a cutting involved and we now assume that people are above and below that. As I read on I noticed that Dickens uses the cutting as a main feature in his story and uses it to create a lot of tension throughout the story. Dickens uses adjectives to describe the setting and makes the cutting seem isolated by using the words “deep, precipitous, clammy, oozier and wetter” and starts to build up an uncomfortable atmosphere. These words also have a feeling of wetness. By using tactile imagery Dickens gets the reader to imagine that they are there, and to experience all of the words above. The signalman thought there was something supernatural about the visitor saying “Halloa, below there” and even asked the visitor why he said them. The signalman also asked the visitor not to call down until they were close, because then he would be certain that the visitor was not a ghost or something else. The signalman was scared, and if he is scared then the reader wants to know why and wants to read on. Dickens uses repetition in his language to get his point across. The use of repetition of the opening sentence, especially where the ghost waves his arms, is very weird and this may make the reader very edgy of the character.
The signalman describes the tunnel as a “great dungeon”. Such a strong word used in place of a tunnel, gives great atmosphere to the story; this is a superb way of adding tension to the story. He also uses other dark and gloomy adjectives to describe the tunnel. This makes it seem as though it is a mystery and, as many people are afraid of the dark, these are good words to create tension.
I think, during the story, there is a lot of confusion as to the identity of the ghost. As the signalman acts very strangely towards the bell, which did not ring, the reader may think the ghost could be him. Also the way the signalman is suspicious of the visitor saying those words, may lead the reader to create an image of the visitor as being the ghost. Now, the reader is very perplexed as to who the ghost is. If either of them!
Dickens also uses personification to build up tension in the story, which is a great way to introduce passion into the story for example with the phrase, “Angry sunset” makes it sound bizarre because it takes away some of the normality in the story as we do not normally associate sunsets with anger, but rather with tranquillity.
At the end of the story Charles Dickens also leaves you wondering about everything else, which has been cleverly added to his story to increase the tension and suspense. After the signalman actually dies we still know no more about the ghost because Dickens leaves it to our imagination.
I will now be studying “The Hound Of The Baskervilles”, by Arthur Conan Doyle. The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ is an intricate crime detection novel written pre-war in the 18th Century, where Doyle relays facts to the reader incredibly cryptically and at strategic points. These facts, if pieced together correctly, eventually inform the reader of the result of the book and what characters fit in where. It starts with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson solving, really a puzzle rather than a mystery as they find a walking stick left in their office by someone. This however develops into a full-scale mystery that involves murder, betrayal, dishonesty and revenge. This type of novel was popular around the time of being first published because they somehow matched true stories of the time, for example, Jack the Ripper and as it was written in 1887 the Victorians immediately fell for the fictional character, as they like the fact that he cracked every case and always defeated evil. These two short stories, ‘Hound of the Baskervilles’ and ‘The Signalman,’ differ in many aspects. For example ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ is about murder, betrayal and revenge whereas ‘The Signalman’ is more about ghosts and the supernatural. Although they are both alike in the aspect, that they are both mystery and suspense stories.
As a general comparison both authors have written about totally different situations. Also the fact that the stories where written at completely different times in history affects the way in which the story is constructed and consequently written. Different aspects of the story are directly related to the surrounding society at the time when the story was written such as the language used which can be a major pivot point as to whether the reading audience could understand the authors writing or not. I think this is evident in both ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ and ‘The Signalman’ as the language used in ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ is clearly different from that used in ‘The Signalman’. This type of differential between the two stories can greatly affect how parts of the story are relayed to the reader.
As I live in the modern world I can relate to and understand ‘The Signalman’ much better than ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ because of the differences between the way of life in the 18th Century when ‘The Hound Of The Baskervilles’ was written and relatively close to the present when ‘The Signalman’ was written.
