These characters add a haunted environment to the introduction of the story and I feel the story wouldn’t be as original if they were not included.
Paragraph 2:
The story is classically set in a large haunted castle, which has many long passages and walkways. We know this because of the directions given by the characters in paragraph 1, “You go along the passage for a bit, until you come to a door, and though that is a spiral staircase, and half way up that is a landing and another door covered with baize. Go though that and down the long corridor to the end, and the red room is on your left up the steps”. This is a huge set of directions ands adds mystery and suspense at the fear of getting lost and being separated even if it is only from the three in the introduction of the story.
While on the way to the Red Room the narrator encounters all sorts of strange and freakish features of the house, examples of this is the “long, draughty, subterranean passage, and the shadow of the bronze which “fell with marvellous distinctness upon the white panelling” giving him the impression of “someone crouching to waylay” him. Here the writer has used personification giving the shadow human features and making him real.
When we final encounter the Red Room we hear the story of the castle and the sudden end to the young duke. This is another piece of the story that adds tension due to being in the same room where he died and while still wondering bout warnings from earlier. While in the Red Room the spreading darkness is described as “sprouting” and “germinating” which are both used to describe it’s growth and plant like quality of heading towards light.
The main events of this chapter include the extinguishing of the overcast candles and the final climax of the story. The aspect that makes the candles disappearing scary is the “marching” darkness and the fact that is happens one by one while attending to the other. This then leads the character to speaking his feelings, he says, “ steady on” showing his needs and follows with “these candles are needed”, he says this even though there is no one to hear showing another example of personification. One main contributor to the tension in the paragraphs near the climax is the lengthening of the sentence structure, the longer sentences are used to make the narrator feel out of breath and therefore more involved with the actions in the story.
One sure way of knowing the main character’s feelings at certain points in the story are the descriptions quoted by the narrator, for instance we know that just after the seeing the shadow of the bronze group he is feelings nervous and tense as the narrator has stated, “By this time I was in a state of considerable nervous, tension.”
The final part of this paragraph is the climax in which the main character is turned mad by blindness of the dark striking his head upon the bed and other furniture. This is an abrupt ending to the climax as there is a full stop and a pause to show a time lapse.
When we awake we find that the sentence structure has changed to shorter sentences making a more relaxed atmosphere. And the three characters that at the start of the story were described as “grotesque” are now normal. This is not the way I expected the story to end and I also felt the characters change to be a small twist in the story.
Style and ending:
This story has used long and short sentences to create different levels of tension and stress. Generally the larger sentences are used near the climax to create more tension, and the shorter sentences are used at the end and beginning to create a calmer environment.
