Narrative Structure and Suspense

Noël Carroll identifies “suspense” as “a key narrative element in most horror stories.” For Carroll, suspense is an emotion that results from “narrative questions” posed by scenes and events that occur early the story.

A woman clings to a log in the midst of a raging river (Keaton’s Our Hospitality) as our hero, Buster, struggles to find a way to rescue her. A waterfall looms just around the next bend. Will Buster be successful in his attempts to save his apparently doomed love?

Carroll claims that the “suspense” in the scene described above derives from the viewers emotional involvement in a particular question suggested by the narrative; namely, will the drama at the waterfall end with a) the death of Buster’s beloved or b) a dramatic last minute (or second) rescue?

“In popular fiction, suspense generally obtains when the question that arises from earlier scenes and/or events has two possible, opposed answers which have specific ratings in terms of morality and probability.” (TPOH, 137)

The outcome here is not what is important. Rather, it is the opposition between the two possible outcomes that generates suspense. As long as the question(s) remain open, the tension between the twin possibilities may elicit “suspense” from the reader or viewer. Further, the less probable the ‘good’ outcome becomes (and the more probable the ‘bad’), the greater the suspense will be.

“I am suggesting that that, in the main, suspense in popular fiction is a) an affective or emotional concomitant of a narrative answering scene or event which (b) has two logically opposed outcomes such that (c) one is morally correct but unlikely and the other is evil and likely.” (TPOH, 138).

Carroll supposes that horror fiction and films are ideal suspense generators in that they typically feature an immensely powerful, and thoroughly evil, assailant.

“…the audience’s feeling of suspense is rooted in the thought of the situation—which is why the audience does not feel personally endangered—whereas whatever emotion the character feels grows out of her belief that she is endangered, which belief accounts for her discernibly different behavior from that evinced by the audience.” (TPOH, 144)