Tension And Suspense In Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air

Into Thin Air, a book where a man battles nature to reach the top of Mount Everest. During the novel, tension and suspense are used as effects to keep the reader interested. Tension being used to cause stress within the story, and Suspense is used to make the reader excited about the story,or to make them anxious. Into Thin Air; where a man writes about his climb on Mount everest using tension and suspense.

Although there is no effect of mystery, Jon Krakauer, the author of Into Thin Air, does create suspense throughout the story. In chapter one he uses pacing to slow down the story and make it more intense when Jon ran out of oxygen and had to make it down the mountain, but had to stop and congratulate the others. This caused suspense making the reader think he would pass out from the lack of oxygen. With the quote, “I removed my now useless mask, planted my ice ax into the mountain’s frozen hide, and hunkered on the ridge. As I exchanged banal congratulations with the climbers filing past, inwardly i was frantic: ‘Hurry it up, hurry it up!... While you guys are fucking around here, I’m losing brain cells by the millions!’ ” On page 10. We know that it is imperative for him to get supplemental air, and he could pass out at any moment.

A short while after Jon and the others reached the top, in the South Col.

camp Krakauer said to himself, “We’d fucking done it. We’d climbed Everest. It had been a little sketchy there for a while, but in the end everything had turned out great. It would be many hours before I learned that everything had not in fact turned out great, that nineteen men and women were stranded up on the mountain by the storm, caught in a desperate struggle for their lives.” The quote from page 203 makes an attempt to add suspense,and succeeds. After seeing this the reader then starts to get curious about what happened to the rest of the crew, then anticipates rhat many of them are very near death, if they hadn’t already

died.
After the expedition, Beck Weathers is on an interview and tells them what it was like with someone reporting everything they did on the mountain. “It added a lot of stress. I was always a little concerned with the idea, you know, this guy going to come back and write a story that’s going to be read by a couple of million people. And I mean, it’s bad enough to go up there and make a fool of yourself if it’s just you and the climbing group. That somebody may have written across the pages of some magazine as a buffoon and a clown has got to play upon your psyche as to how you perform, how hard you’ll push. And i was concerned that it might drive people further than they wanted to go, And it might even for the guides.” On page 142. This causes feelings about Jon, that he added extra danger to people by the influence of being written about. They would try anything to keep from getting a bad word about them, they would push themselves past the point of danger and get into serious trouble, or they could push to the summit even if the weather was too much of a problem.