How is suspense used in “The Last Spin”?
“The Last Spin” is a short story full of suspense, the question is how does the story benefit from the suspense? Suspense is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as, “The feeling of excitement or nervousness that you have when you are waiting for something to happen and are uncertain about what it is going to be.” Suspense can be used in writing for many different reasons. Some of these reason may include; to make the reader want to keep reading, to build up to the text’s climax, or to create a scary and expecting feeling for the reader. The element of suspense can be a great addition to a text and make the reader’s experience that much more imaginative as suspense is a feeling that can be thoroughly
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E.g. when Tigo says bang right before pulling the trigger and then releases his breath when the firing pin lands on an empty chamber, it is evident that he is nervous which just works up the suspense even more. There are a lot of suspenseful part throughout the story but the part of the story where suspense is used most is in the last part. First the characters figure out the odds of the chamber not being empty, the odds are 50/50 which increases the suspense as there is as big of chance of the next chamber being empty as there is of it being loaded. The way the characters also seem quite confident and almost cocky gives the reader a sense of the fact that something bad is about to happen since it almost always does. Another factor that adds to the suspense is how casual the two characters have become with each other as authors often increase the impact of a character’s death through getting the reader to care about said character. However the part that, arguably, increase the suspense the most is how the paragraph ends after “and then Danny fired.” The fact that a new paragraph is started is a sign that something big happened and in this case it unfortunately isn’t a happy