A Comparison of Writer’s Techniques in ‘The Whole Town’s Sleeping’ by Ray Bradbury, ‘A Terribly Stra
Uploaded by ashchap on Nov 24, 2002
A Comparison of Writer’s Techniques in ‘The Whole Town’s Sleeping’ by Ray Bradbury, ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’ by Wilkie Collins and ‘The Landlady’ by Roald Dahl
In this essay I will be comparing three short stories: ‘The Whole Town’s Sleeping’ by Ray Bradbury (1950), ‘A Terribly Strange Bed’ by Wilkie Collins (1856) and ‘The Landlady’ by Roald Dahl (1960). These three texts are all from the fear genre. Fear Stories are stories that make us feel fear (or are supposed to), they make the reader scared or frightened. Stories that make us frightened have been popular with people for hundreds of years, with children because they are exciting and make you so caught up in the story that you become genuinely scared as if you are actually the person in the story, and adults because the stories become quite emotional and often very memorable. This makes it much more interesting than a lot of other stories. I chose these stories because they would be easily comparable as they all have the same purpose, which is so scare you. I am going to compare the way Ray Bradbury, Wilkie Collins and Roald Dahl use figurative language and how they create tension and suspense, and mood and tone, during the openings of their three short stories.
In the first few lines of 'The Whole Town's Sleeping', the author describes the setting for a typical fear 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 mentions another thing that is necessary for a typical fear story, the fact that it is night time. All three of the stories I am studying are set at night. This is because it was set in the daytime it simply wouldn’t be scary. The whole town wouldn’t be sleeping, the narrator wouldn’t need a terribly strange bed to sleep in, and Billy Weaver wouldn’t be looking for a landlady. Collins has a different approach for the beginning of 'A Terribly Strange Bed', he describes the characters and what they were doing, which gives a different impression of the story, it doesn't seem like a scary story at first, because there are no obvious signs like in 'The Whole Town's Sleeping’. 'The Landlady' is similar to Collins’ story, because of the description of the main character (‘Billy Weaver’), but is also similar to...