Tension And Suspense In The Lottery

Tension and surprise are two of the most important things an author could include in their work. Tension and suspense can make a literary piece last in the readers’ minds-- memorable. Suspense, surprise, and tension can be very delicate in terms of their effectivity; the author has to know what he or she is doing when handling these literary plot elements-- it is challenging to use these elements in an effective manner. With that being said, I can personally assert that both the authors pulled it off. The interlopers is about an old rivalry between two men and their family, the story revolves around their unexpected reconciliation during their encounter with one another in a dark forest. While the Lottery is about an annual tradition with

By manipulation of time, I mean that they used flashbacks to reveal important details that adds to the overall tension of the stories. In the interlopers that author gave key information in the form of a flashback, in fact, the author spent a great fraction of the beginning of the story to explain the history of the family’s hatred for one another: “ A famous law suit, in the days of his grandfather, had wrested it from the illegal possession of a neighbouring family of petty landowners; the dispossessed party had never acquiesced in the judgment of the Courts, and a long series of poaching affrays and similar scandals had embittered the relationships between the families for three generations.” In the lottery, the author mostly used manipulation of time in order to give more context to the lottery and how ancient the tradition was: “The original paraphernalia for the lottery had been lost long ago, and the black box now resting on

Saki used very ominous details to suggest an impending crises; the description of the forest’s state of unrest contributed to this. The author of the lottery however, took a different approach to create this effect of surprise. In the interlopers, the author described “The roebuck, which usually kept in the sheltered hollows during a storm-wind, were running like driven things to-night, and there was movement and unrest among the creatures that were wont to sleep through the dark hours.” And in the lottery, the authors described the setting through this sentence: “The morning of June 27th was clear and sunny, with the fresh warmth of a full-summer day; the flowers were blossoming profusely and the grass was richly green.” Saki gives great tension to the reader by suggesting that there is an approaching conflict/ confrontation about to happen. Shirley JAckson, instead used a disarming/ diffusing language to make the reader not anticipate anything of discomfort to happen; it does not suggest whatsoever that an annual community stoning is about to occur. This is the way the authors used the description of settings to their