The Red Room is most effective in building up suspense because the writer use a range of techniques to draw in the reader. The setting of The Red Room is in a castle that is apparently infested with ghosts in one particular room. The castle comes across as ancient because there are senior residents and they seem to know everything that is going on in the castle. In the beginning of the story, it seemed as if they were in a living room at night. This is because the old woman is sitting near a fireplace. The use of characters is unusual because, they are not identified, they are named by their description or what they do, e.g. the man with the withered arm. This creates suspense because, it makes you wonder, why is he withering his arm? Is he afraid of something? This makes you want to read on.
The narrator is the man who is telling the story. H.G Wells makes his narrator seem as if he can stand up to anything. He makes the narrator the kind of person that looks down to people that are scared of things but at the same time, he is hiding his own fear. At the very beginning of the story, he says that the only ever thing that could frighten him is a very tangible ghost. He also mentions that he is 28 years old and he has never set eyes on a ghost in the years he has lived. This creates huge suspense because, is this finally his moment of seeing a ghost? He has lived 28 years, has his day come? He seems certain that he will not see a ghost and even if he does, he is not the slightest bit scared (so he says). Whist analysing the ways of the narrator, I reckon that the reader learns that the narrator is a cowardly person that should have been honest from the start. If not that, he shouldn’t have mentioned ghosts and there would have been a complete turn of events. However, by doing so, he has made himself participate in an unnecessary solo journey to a room, which had been rumoured to be full of ghosts. On the contrary, the story does start with the narrator speaking first, saying he is not scared of ghosts and that it would take a tangible one to frighten him. So, we have no clue of what had happened or what their conversation had been before the first line of the story. We also do not know what was going on in the authors’ head at the time.
The story is set in a castle. In the start of the story, they are all in the living room conferring about the narrator going to the room that he claims he is not scared of. Gradually, the narrator takes his belongings and makes his way to the room. Passing through doors and going up spiral staircases. Before the narrator makes his way to the room, the man with the withered arm uses repetition in his words. He keeps saying to the narrator, “It’s your own choosing” after everything the narrator does or says. This builds suspense because he is putting words into the narrator’s head knowing he is not going to back out but if something does happen, he will know he warned him. The fact that he is saying that repeatedly, he is making the narrator fear for himself.
The characters in the story include an old woman, two old men and the narrator. The characters are not identified. In the story, the characters are named after their description or what they are doing, e.g. the man with the withered arm. This creates suspense because, it makes you wonder, why is he withering his arm? Is he afraid of something? This makes you want to read on. The characters are the people that informed the narrator about the room and how is has ghosts. Because the narrator said at the beginning of the story that he is not scared of ghosts, the characters try their best to convince him there is an actual ghost and that it would scare him but instead the narrator shows he is brave. This adds suspense because the narrator is not taking any interest in what the characters are saying and is acting as if he wants to go to the room to prove them wrong.
The story is not set out like a typical short story because; the short stories I read have animated pictures. The story is at it’s highest in tension and suspense when the narrator is making his way to the room and he finally enters the room. The writer uses a range of techniques to make you feel afraid for the narrator. This is because, by reading the story, it makes you feel frightened for the narrator and wonder whether he is going to make it out of there ok. The narrator is describing what is going on as he makes his way to the room, he say’s “my mind reverted to the three old and distorted people downstairs, I tried to keep it upon that topic”. This shows that he is trying to convince himself that the old characters are lying. By thinking about the old characters, he reckons that the sounds and shadows he is seeing is nothing. He tries to think to himself that nothing supernatural is going to happen but he is finding it difficult to concentrate on one thing as he is convince that something is lurking around. As the tension and suspense keeps rising when the narrator is hearing things, seeing things, the tension and suspense suddenly drops because he finally realises that there was no ghost or anything to be afraid of, it was just his mind and imagination playing with him. The narrator realises that the noises that he was hearing was probably the wind blowing outside or the owls howling outside. The thing he was seeing was probably shadows from the furniture or reflecting light on him. The reader would give a sigh of relief after realising it was nothing at all. The old characters had kept going on and on as if they had set eyes on the ghost. They put pressure on the narrator knowing that he wasn’t going to back down. They made the narrator realise that he has fear and is scared of things. So, the narrator also learns a lesson of not being to hard headed.
In conclusion, before this essay I had read The Red Room, The Signalman and
The Man with the Twisted Lip. I learned that all three stories were written in the gothic genre, which was very popular in the nineteenth century. The Red Room reflects more on the gothic genre than the other two stories. I focused on the way The Red Room creates tension and suspense in the use of words and that in the nineteenth century, they didn’t use names to identify their characters or they didn’t identify their characters compared to nowadays. The Red Room is effective in making the reader want to read on, this is because the words used are very powerful because every word the writer uses, you have to take into account. For example, when the narrator says that he is 28 years old and never seen a ghost, you wouldn’t really think of it as anything until you think of all the ways to make you feel tension and suspense. The main way to see it is that he is still young and that he is bound to see a ghost especially in the eyes of the people living in the 19th century because rumours about people seeing ghosts had been going round quite a lot.
