How did the authors of the mystery stories 'The Red Room', 'The Engineers thumb' and 'The Signalman' create suspense in their stories?

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Mohammed Ali Ahmed                              10H/RBn 10E/4                                      11/11/08

How did the authors of the mystery stories 'The Red Room', 'The Engineers thumb' and 'The Signalman' create suspense in their stories?

For this piece of coursework, I am going to be comparing the way that three short stories written and how they create suspense. The three stories are:

·The Red Room by H.G. Wells

·The Engineer's thumb by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

·The Signalman by Charles Dickens

I will be analysing all three stories and doing comparisons between them to show what I have found out about how they create suspense and how it is used in each of the stories.

In the Red Room, archaic (referring to an earlier period) language is used on several occasions. One of the times it is used is when the young man says 'Eight-and-twenty years, I have lived, and never a ghost have I seen as yet'. From this I can infer that the story was not set in this generation as now we would not say 'eight and twenty years' we would say twenty eight years. Also, when the young man says 'never a ghost have I seen as yet'. This language would also rarely be used in this generation. This is also archaic. The archaic language contributes to the way the story is written and the reader would be able to quickly understand that the story is set in an earlier generation if they were unaware. Archaic language is also used in the story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Engineer's thumb, as the narrative voice of the story says 'not more than five-and-twenty, I should say'. This compares to the story the Red Room as archaic language is used in the same way in both of the short stories. This also compares with the third short story as in the Signalman the narrator says 'Said I, when I rose to leave him'. Now we would say 'I said' but in the earlier time periods they would not have spoken like this. As these three stories were all written before 1914 the audience then would have expected this language.

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         In the Signalman there is some repetition because when the voice is heard shouting 'Halloa! Below there' a while later the same voice calls to him again saying the same thing. Also, it creates suspense because the reader would want to know who exactly is shouting and why. Another point is that in the Signalman when the signalman is killed by the train the driver reveals that he tried to warn the signalman by calling 'Halloa! Below there' but the signal man did not seem to listen. This would create a lot of suspense as the reader would want to know ...

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