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How authors create suspense
How authors create suspense
How authors create suspense
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More handpicked essays just for you.
How authors create suspense
How authors create suspense
How authors create suspense
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Throughout the story, Connell uses suspense, irony, and foreshadowing to hold the reader's’ interest. Suspense is used in the beginning of the story when Rainsford dropped his pipe off the boat when he heard a gun that was fired three times. He lunged for the pipe but then realized that he went too far and and fell into the warm waters of the Caribbean Sea. The author uses suspense to hold the reader’s interest.
In one of his most famous short stories, “The Most Dangerous Game”, Richard Connell uses many devices to develop suspense. The devices that are most successful for creating suspense are the devices of foreshadowing through dialogue and imagery along with his cryptic cliffhangers in the forms of narrative description and unanswered questions. Connell foreshadows the events Rainsford has to go through using dialogue and narrative description that is open to interpretation. Connell uses dialogue to foreshadow the events that will happen when Whitney notices that “‘There was no breeze’” but instead felt a “...mental chill; a sort of sudden dread’"(Connell, 2).
Ambrose Bierce uses characterization, irony, and foreshadowing to create forms of suspense in An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge. In part one of the story, Bierce creates suspense in the form of expectancy by characterizing who Peyton Farquhar is thought to be by directly telling what he looks like. He states: He was a civilian, if one might judge from his habit, which was that of a planter. His features were good--a straight nose, firm mouth...dark hair combed straight back, falling behind his ears to the collar of his well fitting coat...
“Suspense combines curiosity with fear and pulls them up a rising slope,” quote by Mason Cooley summarizes the idea of how W.F. Harvey creates suspense in his short story, “August Heats.” Everyone likes a little suspense in their life so W.F. Harvey attracts his audience by using foreshadowing, “the use of hints to suggest events later in the plot,” (source 1) a reversal is involved, “a sudden change in a character’s situation from good to bad or vice versa,” (source 1) and the narrator withholds information from the reader. With these steps the author intrigues the audience to continue reading and cause them to feel frightened as they read. W.F. Harvey first begins to get the character interested in the reading by the way he signals hints towards the reader in order to get them thinking about events that could possibly happen. As the reader continues reading W.F. Harvey introduces more hints that might change the way of thinking of the reader.
Rogelio Ochoa Freed Period 2 Feb 8, 2023 Perception of Owl Creek Bridge One may see something as they want it to be instead of how it really is. The story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce takes place in Alabama. Peyton Farquhar the protagonist of Beirce’s story is a man who is to be hanged and takes place on Owl Creek Bridge. Farquhar was told that anyone who tried interfering with the railroad construction that was happening on the bridge would be hanged.
Literary analysis of “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” Ambrose Bierce, the Author of “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” about a man who was being hanged, throughout the story Peyton hallucinates and thinks that he has escaped the hanging but in reality he’s dying. Bierce uses symbolism in “ An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” to foreshadow that Peyton is going to die. There are multiple allusions throughout the story that Bierce used to convey the death of Peyton. Imagery is used throughout the entire story to show that Peyton is hallucinating. Throughout the entire story Bierce uses multiple literary techniques to foreshadow Peyton’s death.
In the short story, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce, the author tells the story of a man named Peyton Farquhar who was hanged for his crimes and being a Confederate saboteur. Within seconds of being hung, Farquhar imagines himself surviving being hung and escaping to his family. Ultimately, he actually dies since it was only a manipulation of reality. Besides the fact of his death, Time is an idea that it clearly present in the story and demonstrates an important role. Time plays an important role in the story by displaying how extraordinary the mind can do in a short period of time, that 8 manipulation of time does not remove one from reality and Farquhar’s lack of control of events.
Bierce uses foreshadowing to create a certain approach in the story, “Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In this story, we learn that a man is getting hung when all of a sudden he has an imagination of escaping and going home, as he awakens from his imagination and gets hung; leaving the readers in awe. The techniques that Bierce uses to create this action is Imagery, Allusion, and Symbolism. These techniques compute to foreshadowing.
In literary terms foreshadowing is a method by which the author uses specific verbiage in a story to tell, or foreshadow, what is going to happen. The reader may feel as if they know what is going to happen before they read it, they could feel like a clairvoyant or that they are having a déjà vu experience. Ambrose Bierce’s story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” has instances of foreshadowing that allude to the death of Peyton Farquhar before the story reaches the climactic point of telling of his fate. The first instance of foreshadowing is when Peyton Farquhar thinks that he can escape the hangman’s noose and swim home.
In stories both fiction and nonfiction, the author’s choice in the structure of the said story can greatly affect the meaning given to it, as well as the reader’s response to the story. In Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death, Poe uses chronological order as well as metaphors and allegory to create a particular feel. Similarly, in A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, the author uses different structure - beginning with the end, then going more chronologically - to create a different feeling. Both stories would be completely different if it were not for the methods the authors chose to use for their stories’ structure.
In conclusion, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” demonstrates several foreshadowing techniques to predict Farquhar’s fate, such as imagery and preternatural plot elements. The preternatural ability to hear a watch ticking at a vociferous volume reveals that Farquhar was simply imagining that his time is ticking away. Also, the use of imagery when he is unnaturally describing the distant trees in great detail shows that he is dreaming about that as well and not living in reality, so he has not escaped the fact that he will die in real
Ambrose Bierce explains the water below Farquhar’s feet with such extreme detail that one can imagine the “'humming of the gnats that danced above the eddies of the stream, the beating of the dragon flies' wings, [and] the strokes of the water-spiders' legs” (Bierce) reading the story. Using this technique helps the reader further focus and comprehend the message of the short story, the cruel Civil War is romanticized. In addition to the imagery, Ambrose Bierce’s well known short story also includes a significant theme of the contrast of a soldier’s glory with the reality of war. In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” Farquhar enters a dream-like delusion of escaping the bullets and his unavoidable hanging, only to be suddenly awakened by the reality of the cruel situation- he was going to be hanged. Bierce creates Peyton Farquhar as a character whose romantic ideals blind him from the harsh truth of war, and therefore contributes to the overall theme contrasting the idealistic mindset of soldiers and the gruesome reality of
Suspense in live to tell and the interlopers The two stories “live to tell” chapter two and “the interlopers” both stories have suspense so the end of the story is ironic. And the both have real interesting endings of the sort’s stories. “Live to tell” was mad by Lisa Gander and “the interlopers was written by Saki.
Reaction to “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” by Ambrose Bierce While reading this story I found to focus on the element of theme because the story was a bit unusual. The author explores the idea of time in this story because there are specific parts when situations are happening and the time comes off as “quickly”, and it seems that in other moments, time moves in slow motion. An example would be when the main character is tied up and is facing the military.
“A Rose for Emily” is a unique short story that keeps the reader guessing even though its first sentence already reveals the majority of the content. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is the epitome of a work that follows an unconventional plot structure and a non-linear timeline, but this method of organization is intentional, as it creates suspense throughout the story. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” follows an unusual plot structure, which creates an eccentric application of suspense to a short story. Throughout the story, there are no clear indications of standard plot structure in each section, such as intro, climax, and denouement. Instead, there are sections, which are not in chronological order, that describe a particular conflict or event, which in turn creates suspense, as each conflict builds upon each other to make the reader question the overall context and organization of the story.