An author has effectively created suspense when the reader feels compelled to keep reading to see what happens. Bradbury creates suspense and hints at danger in the first few lines of the story by letting the reader know that there is a problem with the children's nursery. The wife mentions the possibility of a psychologist examining the nursery, which causes the reader to question the necessity of her request. Why would a psychologist need to visit a room? When George and Lydia visit the nursery and see that the lions have been eating, George assumes the lions must have eaten an animal. Lydia, however, responds with, "Are you sure?" Her question creates more suspense because the reader again must question why she feels the way she does. Bradbury provides more clues that something dangerous or frightening will happen. For example, George sees the door of the nursery shake as if something hits it from inside, he hears screams from the nursery, and inside he finds an old wallet of his and a scarf belonging to his wife. Both the wallet and the scarf are bloody. Finally, when the psychologist sees the room, he says, "This is very bad." These hints of something terrible create suspense and encourage the reader to keep reading.
Bradbury uses imagery and foreshadowing to create and maintain suspense in this short story. The story constantly brings us back, through the eyes of the increasingly anxious parents, to the ominous veldt that the children watch obsessively in the nursery. The veldt is described using unpleasant images that make the parents and, hence the reader, uneasy: it's very hot under a blazing sun, vultures circle, and lions prowl. At one point, the lions seem to lunge at the parents, causing them to run frightened from the nursery. At other points, the parents hear screams, as if the lions are eating humans. As time goes on, hints that the veldt is a threat to the parents magnify: the Hadleys find Mr. Hadley's chewed wallet, complete with saliva and bloodstains, on the nursery floor, as well as Mrs. Hadley's bloody scarf. All of these ominous happenings hint at or foreshadow that the lions will eat the Hadley parents. This raises our suspense: are the parents irrational or reasonable in their fears? Can lions in a televised program actually destroy real humans? Will the Hadley parents actually be murdered in the nursery, as all the hints indicate? Or can get they get away?
How does the author create and maintain suspense in "The Veldt"?
Bradbury builds suspense through the use of uncertainty. It makes absolutely no sense that the video images projected on the nursery walls are anything more than realistic film of the African veldt. In a rational universe, the images could not cross from the view screens into the real world the Hadley's occupy.
And yet, step by step, Bradbury creates the creepy feeling that this is exactly would could—and did—happen.
Part of how he does this is by having Mr. Hadley provide a reasonable explanation for the nursery after it has frightened Lydia. This reasonable explanation nevertheless leaves the readers saying "but" . . .
Walls, Lydia, remember; crystal walls, that's all they are. Oh, they look real, I must admit—Africa in your parlor—but it's all dimensional, superreactionary, supersensitive color film and mental tape film behind glass screens.
Bradbury has already undercut Mr. Hadley's reasonable conclusion with the vivid description of the lions and the veldt that he provides, so realistic it helps convince the audience the lions just could just be real:
. . . you could feel the prickling fur on your hand, and your mouth was stuffed with the dusty upholstery smell of their heated pelts . . . and the smell of meat from the panting, dripping mouths.
Bradbury continues to build suspense by dropping hints that lead us to suspect something very bad is going to happen. For example, near the end of the story, David McClean picks up Lydia's bloody scarf from the nursery floor. At this point, it seems the "fiction" of the view screens and the "fact" of the real world can converge.
Finally, we have the odd behavior of the children, who seem much more attached to the nursery than to their parents. This also raises the prickly feeling that something is going to go very wrong.
How does the author create and maintain suspense in "The Veldt"?
Suspense is created through the use of foreshadowing.
Suspense is the interest a reader has in a story. It is the feeling of wondering what is going to happen and wanting to keep reading to find out. One way Bradbury creates suspense in this story is through the use of foreshadowing, which is when an author drops hints early in the story that help the reader make predictions.
There seems to be something wrong from the beginning of the story. Lydia Hadley wants her husband George to come look at the nursery or show it to a psychologist. This is not a normal occurrence, so the reader should begin to feel more and more uneasy. When we learn about the expensive HappyLife home that does everything for them, and the expensive nursery, we are more and more interested to know what is going on.
Once in the room, it is clear that this is where the problem is.
"Let's get out of this sun," he said. "This is a little too real. But I don't see anything wrong."
The fact that the parents are concerned about the nursery, and say that it is too real, foreshadows the ending when the animals eat the parents. The children’s reactions to their parents’ concerns also shows that they might be homicidal.
Bradbury’s story is suspenseful because it keeps us guessing. We get hints from the very beginning that something is wrong, and these hints directly foreshadow (hint at) the murder of the parents by their violence-obsessed spoiled children. There's a dark warning here. If you overindulge people, they become dangerous.
In the short story "The Veldt" how does the author create suspense in the story through crude textual evidence?
The definition of "crude" relies upon some subjective conditions; what is crude to one person might not be to another. Typically, crude things are those which hearken more to the "animalistic" side of human nature, and many in a civilized society would consider impolite to mention, not only because they may be inherently antagonistic but also because mentioning them reflects a lack of social courtesy. Crudeness may also reflect a simple lack of refinement, such as by sparing descriptive details; for example, describing the sun as hot.
The use of crude details or imagery in a story can be employed to shock the reader, or to call attention to the lack of civilized influence that the presentation of the crude statement presents.
In "The Veldt", crude imagery is generally employed to represent how civilization is absent in the nursery, and has been replaced with the brutal details of the natural world. There are repeated references made to blood, particularly the smell of it, but the only other crude detail that might be considered offensive is the single mention of "clean bones" left behind by the lions after feeding. Instead, the majority of crude details are simply those which lack refinement; the sun is hot, the land is yellow, and so forth. This may represent the simple nature of the landscape, or the simple mentalities of the children who imagined it.
These details create suspense because they feel artificially stunted, and reflect the simplicity and brutality of this landscape. Compare this to the conjured depiction of Rima and her forest, and the details used to describe her, and the generally pleasant and benign mood this creates. The crudeness of the African setting's details is a reminder that civilization is absent there.
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