Suspense: I believe Carson-Newman College has the most thorough definition of the word, with assertions we can use to analyze short stories going forward...
"SUSPENSE (from Latin suspendere, "to leave hanging"): In literary works with a plot, suspense is "a state of uncertainty, anticipation, and curiosity as to the outcome of a story or play, or any kind of narrative in verse or prose" (Cuddon 937), i.e., emotional tension resulting from the reader's desire to know "what will happen next?" or "what is actually happening now"? Frequently, the greatest moment of suspension occurs at the climax of the plot...
As T. A. Shipley notes, the two main types of suspense (uncertainty and anticipation) appear in the earliest surviving literary works in Greece (563). While Euripides and Sophocles usually wrote about mythological materials already familiar to their audiences (and thus could not create suspense by making the audience guess what would happen next), Euripides created suspense by mixing false or misleading foreshadowing with real foreshadowing alluding to upcoming events (563). Such playwrights were also fond of creating suspense by dramatic irony...
Often writers will use suspense to manipulate the reader by terminating a section of the narrative at a dramatic point. The idea here is often to lure the reader or audience back to the story at some future date. Examples of this would be cliffhangers that deliberately (and sometimes literally) leave the hero hanging off the edge of a cliff at the end of a chapter or scene, or the strategy of Scherazhade in the 1001 Arabian Nights, who continually whets the Sultan's appetite to hear the rest of a story, so he spares her life for another night rather than executing her.
Suspense is typically a vital component in genres such as mystery novels, penny dreadfuls, ghost stories, creepypastas, and action-adventure novels."
How does Poe create suspense in his story "The Tell-Tale Heart"? Of course, we must consider the conflict…
- Mad character, and his internal thoughts retold to audience…
- Withholding of detail – tells of murder, but not why or what happens that he confesses…confession comes at the end!
- The drawn out method of his deed: step-by-step of his murder.
- The drawn out syntax – “It was open – wide, wide open – and I grew furious as I gazed upon it.”
- How many times does he describe the old man or his eye? How does he describe it? What does this do for you as a reader?
- Symbolism
- Dramatic irony, as defined by Carson-Newman College: (the most important type for literature) involves a situation in a narrative in which the reader knows something about present or future circumstances that the character does not know. In that situation, the character acts in a way we recognize to be grossly inappropriate to the actual circumstances, or the character expects the opposite of what the reader knows that fate holds in store, or the character anticipates a particular outcome that unfolds itself in an unintentional way. Probably the most famous example of dramatic irony is the situation facing Oedipus in the play Oedipus Rex
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