suspense

Suspense is a state of mental uncertainty, anxiety, being undecided, or being doubtful. In a narrative work, suspense is the audience's excited anticipation about the plot or conflict (which may be heightened by a violent moment, stressful scene, puzzle, mystery, etc.), particularly as it affects a character for whom the audience feels sympathy. However, suspense is not exclusive to narratives. In narratives In literature, films, television, and plays, suspense is a major device for securing and maintaining interest. It may be of several major types: in one, the outcome is uncertain and the suspense resides in the question of who, what, or how; in another, the outcome is inevitable from foregoing events, and the suspense resides in the audience's anxious or frightened anticipation in the question of when. Readers feel suspense when they are deeply curious about what will happen next, or when they know what is likely to happen but don’t know how it will happen. Even in historical fiction, with characters whose life stories are well known, the why usually brings suspense to the novel. An adjunct to suspense is foreshadowing, as found in hints of national crisis or revolution in Isabel Allende’s House of the Spirits (1991). Examples In Sophocles' Oedipus Rex (429 B.C.), suspense is achieved through a withholding of the knowledge that Oedipus himself has killed Laius, his father. During the play, the spectators, aware that Oedipus will eventually make the discovery, share the hero's uncertainties and fears as he pursues the truth of his own past. In George Washington Cable's story "Jean-ah Poquelin" (1875), the reader wants to know the cause of the strange smell and the unexplained disappearance of a brother. In Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson (1895), the reader anticipates the outcome of the switching of a black infant with a white infant. In Ernest J. Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men (1983), the reader waits for the court's decision at a murder trial.