Suspense

Enumeration

Enumeration (2) is a stylistic device by which separate things, objects, phenomena, properties, actions are named one by one so that they produce a chain, the links of which are forced to display some kind of semantic homogeneity.

Most of notions are associated with other notions due to some kind of relation between them: dependence, cause and result, likeness, dissimilarity, sequence, experience, proximity.

That is not the case in the following passage:

"Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole as-sign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend and his sole mourner."

"Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was profound, for he reached each new place entirely without hope or fever, and could concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling belts, the priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros, cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers, sunsets, melons, mutes, great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of a fascinating land."

This enumeration can be approximately grouped in semantic fields:

1) donkeys, mules, crowing cork?, singing birds;

2) priests, beggars, children;

3) villages, patios, cactus-hedges, churches, tumbling bells, sombre­ros, pictures;

4) sunsets, swimming grey-brown mountains, greening plains, olive-trees, melons.

Enumera­tion may be regard­ed as a stylistic device, inasmuch as the objects in the enumeration arc not distributed in logical order and therefore become striking.

"The principal production of these towns... appear to be- soldiers, sailors, Jews, chalk, shrimps, officers and dock-yard men."

Suspense (3) is a compositional device which consists in arranging the matter of a communication in such a way that the less important, descriptive, subordinate parts are amassed at the beginning, the main idea being withheld till the end of the sentence. Thus the reader's atten­tion is held and his interest kept up, for example:

Sentences of this type are called periodic sentences, or periods. Their function is to create suspense, to keep the reader in a state of uncertainty and expectation.

"But suppose it passed; suppose one of these men, as I have seen them-meagre with famine, sullen with despair, careless of a life which your Lordships are perhaps about to value at something less than the price of a stocking-frame:— suppose this man surrounded by the children for whom he is unable to procure bread at the hazard of his existence, about to be torn for ever from a family which he lately supported in peaceful industry, and which it is not his fault that he can no longer so support;— suppose this man, and there are ten thou­sand such from whom you may select your victims, dragged into court, to be tried for this new offence, by this new law; still there are two things wanting to convict and condemn him; and these are, in my opi­nion,— twelve butchers for a jury, and a Jeffreys for a judge!

Suspense and climax sometimes go together. All the information contained in the series of statement-clauses preceding the solution-statement are arranged in the order of gradation.

Suspense requires long stretches of speech or writing.

"If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, /f you can trust yourself when all men doubt you And make allowance for their doubting too,

/f you can dream and not make dreams your master, /f you can think and not make thoughts your aim,

Yours is the earth and everything that’s in it,.. And which is more, you'll be a Man, my son."

Suspense, due to its partly psychological nature (it arouses a feeling of expectation), is framed in one sentence, for there must not be any break in the intonation pattern. Separate sentences would violate the principle of constant emotional tension which is char­acteristic of this device.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11