Suspense In Frankenstein

Suspense is often discussed along with other emotion processes such as curiosity and surprise (Sternberg 1978, Chatman 1978). According to Chatman (1978, 171), suspense may derive from the curiosity e.g. reader’s interest what is going to happen further. British academic and writer Botting (1996, 41) notes that “the use of suspense encourages imaginations to indulge in extravagant speculations”. Sternberg states that the feeling of suspense arises due to two opposite scenarios about what is going to happen further: from the discrepancy between what the telling lets us readers know about the happening (e.g., a conflict) at any moment and what still lies ahead, ambiguous because yet unresolved in the world. Its fellow universals rather involve

The reader desires for the relaxation, which appears having received the missing information (cf. Sternberg 1978, 244; Fill 2003a, 264).
However, it does not mean that suspense derives when the outcome is unknown. Suspense may be created when the outcome is already obvious. For instance, when you watch the movie Titanic, you know that the ship is going to sink, but you may wonder what will happen to the characters (Curthoys and McGrath 2009, 146-147).
In terms of surprise, Chatman points out that surprise together with suspense can work in narratives in complex ways: a chain of events may start out as a surprise, work into a pattern of suspense, and then end with a “twist” that is, the frustration of the expected result – another surprise. Great Expectations provides classic examples; its plot is a veritable network of suspense-surprise complexes. To add to the complexity, these operate at both the story and discourse levels Chatman (1980, 60).

Moreover, Iwata (2008, 5) notes that literary stories usually encompass suspense and surprise rather than containing either of them

“A question is in a way an “open”sentence; it requires an answer which syntactically (and often semantically too) gives the relaxation of the tension created in the question” (Fill 2003a, 266). Meanwhile German and English literature scholar Ingo R. Stoehr adds (2001, 468) that “the reader keeps reading to find the answers to such questions as: Who did it?” Questions may be stirred up directly in interrogative form or indirectly by establishing certain facts, which make the readers to raise the question in their minds (cf. Dunne 2009, 242). An American author, playwright, scriptwriter, and teacher Dunne (2009, 240) distinguishes two types of questions – small, which are being stirred up throughout the scenes and bigger, which are being raised throughout the story. According to Fill (2003b, 38, 41), interrogative sentences tends to generate more tension than just simple statements.
Furthermore, suspense may be induced by employing different verb tenses within the same sentence. For instance, the clause, which starts with the pluperfect tense, is followed by the past continues tense that reveals the outcome (Fill 2003a, 267). Thus the transition from the prior action to the subsequent makes the reader experience