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How Does Mary Maloney Create Suspense In Lamb To The Slaughter

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“Lamb to the Slaughter” is set in a warm, dark room that creates a false sense of security in the reader. The reader may or may not anticipate the suspense in the text wondering what’s going to happen. While the setting in “The Tell Tale Heart” is in a dark house. The dark house creates an atmosphere in which the reader would think that something spooky might happen and it creates mystery and suspense. The setting in “LTS” is used by the author as the main focus, it has different scenes where suspense is used such as when Mary Maloney kills her husband and she doesn’t show any emotions. Mary murdered Patrick in cold blood and appeared to keep calm and appear normal. This story has a twist in it as the reader expects something and the story …show more content…

The characters are involved in the murder of Mary’s husband Patrick, Mary Maloney is the loving wife of the husband and a psychopath. Mary is faithful to Patrick and at the beginning of the book Mary appears normal. The grocer is just a normal grocer, a small character in the book that shows Mary keeping calm while visiting him even though she has just murdered her husband. The other characters that appeared in “LTS” are the police officers that are friends with Patrick and Mary Maloney, they arrived when Mary went back and tried to act like her husband was murdered by an intruder. One of the police officers is Patrick’s co-worker. The main character in “Tell Tale Heart” is a “Mad Man” that has been ill, and after the illness, it made his mind, feelings and senses stronger. There is the old man who the “Mad Man” wishes to kill, not the old man but his “Vulture Eye”, the “Mad Man” acts friendly and kind to the old man to get closer to him. The Mad Man wanted to kill the old man because his “vulture eye” was giving him pain. But the old man had no “Vulture Eye” it was just the hallucination of the Mad Man. The old man living alone gives out mystery and suspense because the reader wants to know why he was in that …show more content…

The language used in “LTS” is kind of psychotic due to Mary laughing while the police officers are eating the murder weapon and one of Jack’s comrades said "It's probably right under our noses. What do you think, Jack?” Languages used in “TTH” are a strong kind of suspense and emotional language like: “Yes! Yes, I killed him. Pull up the boards and you shall see! I killed him. But why does his heart not stop beating?! Why does it not stop!?” (The language used in “LTS” is light Gothic and in “TTH” it makes the reader focus on the text and is more gothic in language and

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641 Words | 3 Pages

In The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe he builds suspense through character anxiety. First off the reader can imagine the fear in the character when he says “... I heard a slight groan, and I knew it was the groan of mortal terror…” (Poe 91). In this the narrator is talking about the old man when he his hears a noise.

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After we were lead to think Mary shook the whole thing off “Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him and without any pause she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head” and then says “so I’ve killed him”. Furthermore, after Mary’s blow up, she begins to think about the consequences after her actions. We think that Mary wouldn’t kill her husband even though she got bad news, but she had so much stress which caused her to oddly use the leg of lamb as a weapon, even when she admitted she might as well used a steel

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1236 Words | 5 Pages

Another example of when they underestimated Mary was when they were conversing in the kitchen, “That’s a hell of a big club the guy must’ve used to hit poor Patrick,” one of them was saying. “The doc says his skull was smashed all to pieces just like from a sledgehammer.” At this moment it shows that Mary has some care for her husband but not enough care, and she is pretending to help the police find the evidence, but little do they know they are eating the evidence. She tricked some of her closest friends so that she would not get caught. She has no care in the world whatsoever that she just killed her husband and fed the evidence to the policemen.

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This causes Mary to change dynamically from the beginning of the story to the end. When Mary’s husband said that he was leaving her, she does not take it well. She does, quite in fact, not want to believe the statement at all. She refuses to let Patrick leave and does the only thing she is able to do at the moment, “At that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him and without any pause she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head,” (Dahl 3). Mary is in so much shock that she kills her husband with the dinner they were to have that night: a leg of lamb.

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700 Words | 3 Pages

Roald Dahl, the author of this short story, wants the reader to realize how one-sided a relationship can be. While Mary was fully faithful and loving to Patrick; the feelings were not mutual. The feeling of betrayal she felt was beyond imaginable and she ended up going to violence for the answer. She was afraid, angry, shocked, sorrowful, and full of hatred. There may not have been an officially stated reason that she killed him, but in my mind I believe she killed him out of the act of fright and love.

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489 Words | 2 Pages

The police were easily tricked by Mary’s cheerful appearance, and this displays her ability to change her appearance to deceive the police easily. Thus, this should serve as a warning to people to be more cautious. Secondly, Mary also uses a kind gesture as a way to get rid of the murder weapon without a trace. For instance, while the police are searching her house for clues leading to the murder, Mary convinces them that, “It’d be a favor to me if you’d eat it up. Then you can go on with your work again afterwards” (Dahl 10).

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1734 Words | 7 Pages

Mary Maloney “simply walked up” behind Patrick and struck him with a “big frozen leg of lamb” “as hard as she could”. This completely contrasts the starting character of Mary as a housewife whom was patiently waiting for her husband to return home, which no one had expected. She did it “simply” which moulds an image of her not needing to think through her action, effortless and swift. The readers would be disgusted at how fast her character changes, thus suspense would be created as they would constantly question themselves about how it was possible. Additionally, after she struck her husband, she thought that it was “funny” on how “he remained standing” for a while.

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725 Words | 3 Pages

Mary is clever enough to not use a literal weapon and then hide it by cooking the weapon. 15. When the police arrived, they asked Mary what happened, searched the house, spoke gently to her, told her that Patrick was killed by a blow to the back of his head, ate the lamb and had a drink. 16. You can tell that the police are completely taken in by Mary because Mary offers them food and a drink for helping her catch the criminal.

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He refers to himself as Death, implying he has all knowledge and power over the old man. The reader becomes filled with dread as the man patiently waits to kill. The imagery portrayed in “The Tell-tale Heart” increases the demented tone that the narrator projects as the main character waits to strangle the old man. Every night, for a week, the murderer would “look in” upon the victim as he slept.

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787 Words | 4 Pages

When the police detectives are eating their leg of lamb on of them says “Probably right under our very noses. What you think, Jack?”, and it is really right under their noses, when Mary hears that she is “in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle”. This shows that Mary is the cold blooded killer of her husband and that they well never find out because they just ate the murder weapon. In conclusion, there are many reasons why, Mary Maloney was the most interesting character for me, the way she covered up her husband murder, without planning any of it and also how she how she acted without any passion on

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638 Words | 3 Pages

Once she settled down she acts fast with faking a story by going to the store and coming home to the police. She ends up using the weapon as dinner for the police. The author showed how Mary used cowardice throughout the story through the literary devices of Symbolism, Foreshadowing, and Tone.

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294 Words | 2 Pages

Mary Maloney provides the detectives with lamb that she kills her husband, Patrick, with. When the detective declares that the murder weapon is probably right under their noses, it is ironic because the reader knows that they are eating the weapon that the detectives are seeking. Furthermore, situational irony is displayed when Dahl narrates, “At that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him and without any pause, she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high

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776 Words | 4 Pages

Subsequently the action of the story begins to rise as Mary patently waits for her husband to return and continues to increase as it becomes clear that he is preparing to start the matter of divorce. Hence the falling action become interesting because she already killed her husband and wants to cover everything so she acts as an innocent woman as she sees her husband’s friends which are officers, and tries to hide the weapon by making them eat the leg’s lamb. Moreover, the story is expressed from the third person limited omniscient point of view so that the readers can see warmth, cleanliness, and scene of the story through Mary’s eyes. Indeed Mary has shown as a harmless domestic character at

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467 Words | 2 Pages

Mary Maloney makes up an act and gets away with the murder. Mary Maloney is a dynamic character because she changes throughout the story. She changes from a caring and loving wife to a murderer and a crazy person. Mary has more traits like caring, ruthless and clever.

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678 Words | 3 Pages

–here, here! –it is the beating of his hideous heart!" (Poe 7) This event added suspense because the story ended with the reader being unaware of what happened afterwards. There was no way to know how the cops reacted to finding this out or what the repercussions were.

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