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Significance of suspense in literature
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"In the Fog" by Milton Geiger and "The Hitchhiker" by Lucille Fletcher are both suspenseful stories. The stories will send a chill up your spine. Both stories will leave the reader with a spooky feeling and will leave the reader on the edge of their seat. "In the Fog" and "The Hitchhiker" are similar in ways in regards to ghosts, humans and the setting.
Josh Pachter’s “Invitation to a Murder” uses passage of time, inference gaps, and foreshadowing to add suspense. Dramatic irony, inference gaps and red herrings create suspense in “Lamb to the Slaughter” by Roald Dahl. “The Adventure of the Speckled Band” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle uses mystery elements of many possible suspects, accumulation of clues and hidden evidence as catalysts for suspense. All three authors cleverly created anticipation in their work with mystery elements that kept the potential to hold captive their reader’s attention until the very last
Sister Flowers and A View From the Bridge are two short stories with strong correspondence and likeness. In the story, Sister Flowers by Maya Angelou our narrator Marguerite, a young African American female gives the reader introspect of her life and how a scholarly educated and aristocratic woman named Mrs.Bertha Flowers has made an impact on the narrator's life. While in the story A View From the Bridge by Cherokee Paul Mcdonald a man talks about his encounter with a boy he met on a bridge. Both short stories from the choice of character comparisons with both Marguerite and the boy on the bridge , The author's theme,syntax and symbols to overall effectiveness of both narratives proves that these two stories are more the same as a sense to their overall message they are trying to communicate to the reader.
The telling of a ghost story entails more than the text itself. Lighting, environment, tone of voice, and many other factors affect how well a ghost story is told. As one can see by reading the following story, simply reading a ghost story on paper does not have the same effect as hearing it performed by the teller in a fitting atmosphere. The following story was told one night in a dark, shadowy room filled with five or six college guys. The teller used long pauses, emphasis on certain words, and body gestures to make the story all the more believable and chilling.
In the course of human history, man has managed to do some really dumb things. Whether it’s because we lack sufficient knowledge, make a mistake, or are just too stubborn to use sound judgement, dumb decisions are made every day by everyone. However, none have a greater level of stupidity than the choices made by the man in Jack London’s To Build a Fire. This is a story of pride, ignorance, and stupidity, which ultimately leads to the downfall of its main character. This short story is a caution against over confidence and unpreparedness, showing the harsh effects of both. Ultimately, it is an issue of man’s pride versus the harsh conditions of nature. It shows that one cannot simply overlook nature, because doing so can lead to the destruction
Authors often use details that evoke a response in readers to produce an effective description. Their aim is not simply to tell readers what something looks like but to show them. Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Grave” and E.B. White’s “Once More to the Lake” are essays that use subjective language to illustrate the principles of effective description. Porter’s “The Grave” describes a childish afternoon of rabbit hunting that brings death close enough to be seen and understood, while White’s “Once More tot he Lake” is a classic essay of persona; reminiscence in which he recreates the lakeside camp he visited with his son.
“The Hitchhiker,” by Lucille Fletcher, narrates the unusual happenings Ronald Adams, the protagonist, experiences, while driving along the deserted and densely populated roads of the United States. Adams continually observes a hitchhiker, whom he first saw, having almost hit him, on the Brooklyn Bridge, and apprehends traveling on the highways, for fear this phantasmal man shall reappear. Struggling to grasp reality once receiving news of his mother’s breakdown after the death of her son, Ronald Adams, he reverts his attention to the hitchhiker, the realization of never having been who he thought he was, and being alone without protection from the traveler, both wrench his mind in two. Lucille Fletcher uses suspense to build the plot of, “The
The influential British writer, Hugh Kingsmill, once stated, “Society is based on the assumption that everyone is alike and no one is alive” In his novel, The Kite Runner, Hosseini depicts a unique friendship between two boys in a quickly disappearing Afghanistan. Hosseini creates Amir, an ambitious yet selfish character in order to elaborate on the negative effects society has on an individual. After he betrays his friend Hassan, Amir is conflicted and spends the rest of his life attempting to gain redemption by saving Hassan’s son. Similarly, in Of Mice And Men, Steinbeck uses two lowly ranch workers, George and Lennie, to depict a life impacted by the other men and their surroundings. Their valuable friendship is eventually thrown away due to the pressure of society when George is forced to take Lennie’s life. Although in both The Kite Runner and Of Mice And Men, Khaled Hosseini and John Steinbeck demonstrate society’s overbearing power over the individual, Hosseini and Steinbeck use different motifs and settings to convey their ideas regarding society.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Fahrenheit 451 share two main characters that are seemingly lost in the unknown. Both Chief Bromden and Guy Montag are protagonist in the respective novels. These two characters both have a false sense of reality; however, this is the only reality they know. Bromden and Montag have little sense of what the world they live in has to offer. However things start to change for both of these men when they start to receive guidance from their counterparts, Randle McMurphy and Clarisse McClellan. Both of these characters become the catalyst for the freedom and liberation that Bromden and Montag come to find.
Aldous Huxley and Robert William Service reveal though their works that people often become deceived, which makes them think falsely of reality. The novel communicates Bernard’s thoughts while on the drug soma on the helicopter ride: He “laughed; after two grammes of soma the joke seemed, for some reason, good” (Huxley 105). Huxley’s use of soma as a motif for artificial happiness in his quote reveals that Bernard only seems pleasant and easy to laugh because of a false source of his emotions that cause his “happiness.” Bernard only laughs at the electrocuted animals, the cruel joke by the pilot, because the soma influences his thoughts, words, and behaviors. His deceit, caused by drugs, results in
Happiness: an idea so abstract and intangible that it requires one usually a lifetime to discover. Many quantify happiness to their monetary wealth, their materialistic empire, or time spent in relationships. However, others qualify happiness as a humble campaign to escape the squalor and dilapidation of oppressive societies, to educate oneself on the anatomy of the human soul, and to locate oneself in a world where being happy dissolves from a number to spiritual existence. Correspondingly, Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Krakauer’s Into the Wild illuminate the struggles of contentment through protagonists which venture against norms in their dystopian or dissatisfying societies to find the virtuous refuge of happiness. Manifestly, societal
Decisions are made every day, and greater the number of choices, the harder it becomes to evaluate the opportunity cost of a particular option, especially when the outcomes are unknown. Everyone experience a dilemma at some point in life, maybe, critical enough to alter their fates; some regret while others rejoice. Such is the case for the narrator, of “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, who is required to choose his fate. There is deep regret because he “could not travel both” only to settle for the “one less traveled by” (19). Blanche Farley, however, tries to cheat out of regret through her lead character of “The Lover Not Taken;” a companion poem of “The Road Not Taken,” only with a parodistic spin. Although the poems share common features of structure, style and a common theme, there is a distinct difference in the imagery and perspectives in the respective poems.
Imagine a world where a person cannot differentiate between what's real and what's not. Although it's hard to believe it's a real brain problem which effects a good portion of today's people, “Schizophrenia is a brain disorder that affects the way a person acts thinks and sees the world” (“Schizophrenia” 1). Most commonly in schizophrenics they feel and experience things that aren't really there and alter the way they hear and see things. In a fiction book, “ The Hitchhiker” written by Anthony Horowitz the main character Jacob does many things that lead the reader to have inquiries about what his problem is. Jacob obviously has schizophrenia because he has insane delusions and vivid hallucinations.
Suspense. Horror. Fear. All of these things coincide with “The Hitchhiker” by Lucille Fletcher. “The Hitchhiker” is a story about a man named Ronald Adams who is driving cross-country from Brooklyn to California. He leaves his home with his mother worrisome of him having an accident in the motorized vehicle he was in. On the morning he was leaving New york, in the rain, he sees a man on the Brooklyn Bridge. He seemed to have been waiting on a ride. Ronald sees him again an hour later at the Pulaski Skyway. Along several points in his journey, Ronald sees him multiple times, despite the fact that, logically, there was no physical way this man could stay ahead of him. Ronald Adams is more on the insane side. He is insane for the following reasons:
It seems as though Joyce Carol Oates clearly understands the effects of trauma since she writes about several harsh and eerie realities in her “tales of mystery and suspense” from her collection entitled Give Me Your Heart that visibly distinguish her from other writers. In this collection, Oates leaves readers' minds in turmoil and suspense as she releases her emotions by turning what we might think is the norm into something far more insane—perhaps far beyond our understanding. Oates has an obsessive and violent need for love that chills the soul as she takes her readers on an unpredictable ride through her haunted thoughts. She punches readers in the gut by using gothic and sardonic language in her stories while subtly adding a twist of her own eerie ambiguity to portray unrealistic scenarios that we, looking at the bigger picture, may indeed be able to relate to.
William Wordsworth is a British poet who is associated with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, Cumberland, England. Wordsworth’s mother died when he was seven years old, and he was an orphan at 13. This experience shapes much of his later work. Despite Wordsworth’s losses, he did well at Hawkshead Grammar School, where he firmly established his love of poetry. After Hawkshead, Wordsworth studied at St. John’s College in Cambridge and before his final semester, he set out on a walking tour of Europe, an experience that influenced both his poetry.