Suspense In The Cask Of Amontillado

Suspense can add a major plot to a story to make it more intriguing. It can be quite difficult to engage the reader into a story if it’s poorly written or it has too little or much information in there. In a way to catch your readers especially with a topic like suspense, you need to know how to perfect your skills to make the story worthwhile. When reading The Most Dangerous Game and The Cask of Amontillado, several things in each story managed to stand out to the reader which made them want to read to the finish. The authors put in much thought about everything they wrote to engage their readers. The suspense is one of the ways in which the two authors engaged their readers into their stories. The setting between The Most Dangerous Game and

The Cask of Amontillado create suspense by their characters, location, and sound.
In both The Most Dangerous Game and The Cask of Amontillado, the character who can be called the villain adds suspense by not only having a calm demeanor but also by throwing their victim into life threatening situations.

General Zaroff in The Most Dangerous Game tells Rainsford that after a while of staying on the island, he was bored of hunting animals so he moved over to humans over a casual dinner. In a way to add more fear into Rainsford, Zaroff tells him, “I hunt the scum of the earth- sailors from tramp ships- lascars, blacks, Chinese, whites, mongrels- a thoroughbred horse or hound is worth more than a score of them”(pg 75). Afterwards, Zaroff began to explain to Rainsford how he prepares the men for the hunt and then warns the latter to avoid going to certain locations to make the hunt last longer. However, when we are talking about the suspense in The Cask of Amontillado, Montresor drags a drunken Fortunato to the chambers of his family supposedly for Amontillado, while in reality, Montresor was planning on killing him. Montresor pretends that he is worried about Fortunato’s cough while he is also throwing around indirect hints that he is planning on killing him. While they are in the crypt, Montresor gives Fortunato no time to answer his questions as he is chaining him to the wall to die a slow and miserable death. Despite the fact that the characters in a story can help out to add suspense to a story, there is also the location which helps out to make the story

more interesting.
When referring to The Cask of Amontillado and The Most Dangerous Game, the authors managed to make one sick with worry when they are describing the location since it makes one infer about what will happen next.

In The Cask of Amontillado, Montresor leads Fortunato to the crypt which was described as being dark and moist with bones scattered everywhere. Edgar Allan Poe even go as far to say “Its walls had been lined with human remains, piled to the vault overhead, in the fashion of the great catacombs of Paris”(page 90). The great location shift that happened in The Cask of Amontillado was when it shifted from being at a carnival to the crypts which already added to the suspense. However, when referring to The Most Dangerous Game, the location could fill the reader with an anxiety rush since it was dark and mysterious from the beginning to the end. The Most Dangerous Game starts off with Whitney talking about Ship-Trap Island and how the crew’s nerves seemed jumpy when they were nearby. The story starts off in the middle of the ocean while it is dark and foggy out making the reader worry about what will happen to the characters they read about. During the great hunting scene, the location changes with vivid details to make one feel as if they were alongside Rainsford desperately trying to survive. When Rainsford is being told about the dogs, General Zaroff tells him that het sets them upon those who try to run off. To make the dogs seem more mysterious, the author states

“The lights from the windows sent a flickering illumination that made grotesque patterns on the courtyard below, and Rainsford could see moving about there a dozen or so huge black shapes; as they turned toward him, their eyes glittered greenly”(page 76). There is no doubt that the suspense in these stories can be traced back to their location, but to credit what makes people jump from fright is the sound.
With simple sounds such as faint footsteps while you’re the only one at home or children laughing in the dead of night echoing through an empty street, one can make nearly anyone full with uncertainty. When referring to The Most Dangerous Game to gather insight about how sound affects the story, one will learn that sound plays a major role in a story to drag the reader into it. When it came closer to the end of the hunt, Rainsford heard the distant sound of the hounds searching for him. In the story, it stated that “At daybreak Rainsford, lying near the swamp, was awakened by a sound that made him know that he had new things to learn about fear. It was a distant sound, faint and wavering, but he knew it.It was the baying of a pack of hounds”(page 82). This description of that sound alone would be able to increase the reader's anticipation towards what they expect to happen to Rainsford. In the same way, The Cask of Amontillado is able to do the same by describing the little details, such as describing the sounds while the characters are in the crypts which added to the alread high suspense. The only way that Montresor knew that Fortunato’s intoxication level was low was when he heard a low moaning cry which did not belong to a drunken man. Upon Montresor’s departure from the crypt at the end of The Cask of Amontillado, a series of noises rung up into the air and then slowly became nothing. “A succession of loud and shrill screams, bursting suddenly from the throat of the chained form, seemed to thrust me violently back”(page 92) and the sound of laughter rang through the air as Montresor was completing the tiers, trapping Fortunato behind the wall. To make the scene even more suspenseful and dramatic, the only sound that was the jingling bells at the end of The Cask of Amontillado. These simple sounds that the authors decided to include in their stories provided readers with a sense of the little details which made the story better.