Suspense in Gothic Style

Gothic literature is characterized by suspense that comes from not knowing what will happen next in a story. Great Gothic writers like Edgar allan Poe move beyond simple techniques like beginning there stories with descriptions of a dark and stormy night. Poe’s effective narrative choices like: withholding information and controlling pacing develop the narrator’s character and create suspense in his Gothic story “the Black Cat.”

Withholding information is the first way Poe builds suspense. As the story begins, it’s narrator is clearly addressing an audience, as if he knows us already, though we haven’t met him yet. He tells us that he’s not mad and then says: “But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul.” This statement is so extreme that any reader immediately wonders why the narrator is going to die. How could the narrator know this? is he being executed? is execution the right way to deal with crimes, especially by people who display signs of mental illness? couldn’t society develop a more compassionate way of dealing with people in the narrator’s position? None of these questions are answered until much later in the story. To find out why the narrator thinks he’ll die the following day, the now-curious reader must read on. At the end, the narrator confirms that he has been “consigned . . . to the hangman.”

Poe effectively controls the pacing of the story to bild suspense as well. Whenever the action becomes intense or the narrator becomes excited or violent the sentences are either short or very choppy, with numerous short phrases connected by commas. 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. As the pacing slows, the suspense builds and we begin to wonder when things will fall apart again for the narrator.

Personally, I think its strange that people lump Gothic stories into one category. If you know something is Gothic; you know it is going to be suspenseful, which reduces suspense because you know suspense is coming. Even so, Poe creates allot of suspense in the story by using more complex tools and narrative choices then just setting the story on a stormy night in a haunted house or medieval castle. He withholds information, carefully controls the pacing, and ends on a creepy note to add suspense. These narrative choices are so effective that were still reading Poe’s stories (and being drawn in and scared silly by them) more than 150 years after they were first published.