Techniques By Bradbury And Wells To Create/Develop Tension
What Techniques Are Used By Bradbury And Wells To Create, Develop, and Sustain Tension Within Their Stories?
Firstly, dramatic tension is a literary device designed to provoke fear, suspense or excitement in a reader. Both Bradbury and Wells use it in their respective texts – however they do not use it in identical ways. Many similarities can be drawn between the texts but there are crucial differences in the use of this device that are not so evident.
Characterisation is used by Bradbury to bring many different profiles to the reader – we have the emotional bordering on hysterical Francine, Helen who appears cautious to the point of paranoia, and Lavinia who appears to be an uncaring free spirit. The fundamental differences in these characters when juxtaposed with each other subtly throw a reader off balance – we start to wonder why Francine is so desperate for Lavinia not to walk home “…I don’t want you dead” (Pg 16) – is she The Lonely One or does she know when he/she will strike next? – which provokes a series of questions which is the actual cause of the unease in this device. Wells however uses characterisation but lets us build our own perspective of his characters through his conveyed images such as “…the man with the withered arm” (Pg 2). From these we gain a sense of foreboding from these characters as Wells plays on the stereotypes of age – decay and death which makes us uneasy in the prescience of such truly disgusting people – “…his lower lip hung half averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying yellow teeth”, and again we have the question that what is an apparently healthy 28 year old man doing there anyway?
Bradbury uses empathy particularly with Lavinia by firstly letting a reader get inside her head and experience her thoughts and by doing so experience the actual story by Lavinia speaking aloud, such as “ “Someone’s following me,” she whispered to the ravine”, and since she is eventually terrified we experience this terror through her actions. This is coupled with real time – how we experience it is decided by the use of Lavinia counting such as “One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten steps” so we don’t become an impartial observer in her head but become someone with her...