Respuesta :
Answer:
below
Explanation:
Gothic literature is characterized by the suspense of not knowing what will happen next in a story. Great Gothic writers like Edgar Allan Poe move beyond simple techniques to build suspense. His stories are more than the usual "It was a dark and stormy night." In his popular Gothic story, "The Black Cat," you can see Poe effectively using clear narrative choices to build suspense. How he withholds information and how controlled pacing develops the narrator's character are both two good examples of how he does it.
Withholding information is the first way Poe builds suspense. As the story begins, the narrator is clearly addressing an audience. He says it in a way as if he knows us already. It says at the very beginning of the story, "But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul." This statement is so extreme that anyone who would stumble onto these words would be attached, wondering what's going to happen next. None of the questions flowing through the reader's mind are answered until much later in the story. The now-curious reader must read along.
Along with this, Poe effectively controls the pacing of the story to which also builds suspense. Whenever the action becomes intense or the narrator becomes excited or violent, the sentences are either short or very choppy. For example, “...They left no nook or corner unexplored. At length, for the third or fourth time, they descended into the cellar. I quivered not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence…” These sentences are short, direct, and choppy, creating more suspension. When Poe wants to create the illusion that time is passing more slowly; he uses longer and more complex sentences that must be read more carefully and slowly. For example, “To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratification thus derivable. There is something in the unselfish and self-sacrificing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer fidelity of mere Man.” These sentences are very long, showing that time is passing very slowly.
Poe creates suspense in the story by using more complex tools and narrative choices than just setting the story on a stormy night in a haunted house or medieval castle. He withholds information and carefully controls the pacing. These narrative choices are so effective that we're still reading Poe's stories more than 150 years after they were first published.
