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Essay The Whole Town's Sleeping and Terribly Strange Bed

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The Whole Town's Sleeping and Terribly Strange Bed

In this essay I will be comparing two (2) short stories 'The Whole
Town's sleeping' by Ray Bradbury (1950) and 'A Terribly Strange Bed' by Wilkie Collins (1856). Both stories are about fear and they make us feel fear or are supposed to; they make the reader scared or frightened. Both stories have the same purpose, which is so scare the reader. I am going to compare the way Ray Bradbury and Wilkie Collins create tension, suspense, mood and tone.

In the first few lines of 'The Whole Town's Sleeping', the author describes the setting for the story, "the little town was deep far away from everything, kept to itself by a river and a forest and a ravine", but before that he …show more content…

'A Terribly Strange Bed', however is different, as the author seems to create a different mood and tone in the openings to the story. He uses words like "rather a wild life", "delightful city of our sojourn", "idling about", "and splendid city". In 'A Terribly
Strange Bed' the city in which the story is set, is praised in the story, although not really mentioned much "delightful city of our sojourn" it doesn't seem to play a large part in the story and doesn't seem to be anything special. However in 'The Whole Town's sleeping', quite the opposite is the case, the first two paragraphs (half the page) are all about the setting and this is very important to the mood and tone of the story without it, you might not believe that a madman could run around killing people for months without being caught.

Tension and Suspense are also very important in both stories. Tension is built up a little at the beginning of 'The Whole Town's sleeping', before the women find the body and its unexpected. The main excitement of the story is at the end, when Lavinia is running through the ravine. The tension is build up using sentences that get shorter and shorter, so that you read them faster and faster until the last sentences are only a couple of words long and the reader is getting really excited. Then when Lavinia reaches the house and locks the door, the reader feels the relief that the

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