What technique does Susan Hill use to create tension in I'm the King of the Castle. Refer closely to the two incidents in the novel to illustrate your answer.

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What technique does Susan Hill use to create tension in I’m the King of the Castle. Refer closely to the two incidents in the novel to illustrate your answer.

Susan Hill implements a couple of writing techniques to create tension in the novel. Tension n this sense simply means mental strain or excitement in the readers. One of the techniques used is shown when she uses a third-person narration to narrate the story. This narrator is omniscient and implies that he/ she is not one of the characters in the novel and at the same time know everything that is running through the characters’ minds. Hill uses this technique to bring the readers on a journey of moving freely in time and space to allow them to know what any character is doing or thinking at any one point of time. This is only possible because the narrator is not a character in the novel and is allowed to be anywhere, anytime. A limitation of this technique is that the omniscient narrator is in control of what the readers are exposed to and this may in turn produce a biased thinking against a certain character in the novel. This is proven when this narrator tells very little about what Hooper truly thinks and feels towards people, especially Kingshaw. Since the readers have no clue about what he is going to do next, this adds the twists and element of surprises in the plot.

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One incident where the restriction added tension was when the readers were told that Hooper went up to the attic “as soon as the idea had come into his head”. The readers were not introduced to the idea her had come up with to deal with Kingshaw. The narrator only went into describing the attics and told the readers “everything smelled old and dry and hot”. After awhile, “a huge spider, with lumpy, greenish-grey back, scutted out” and Hooper “would have used it to frighten Kingshaw, if the new idea hadn’t come to him”. This leaves the readers clueless ...

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