Chapter 5 suspense

At first it did not occur to Knight that he might die, for it had never happened before; he neither thought of the future nor of the past.He just watched nature try to destroy him, and he fought back. The cliff was like the inner wall of a hollow cylinder, with the sky on top and the sea below; looking around, the cliff formed a semi-enclosed pattern around the bay; looking sideways, he seemed to be able to see the vertical plane surrounding him on both sides.He looked down the deep again, and only then did he fully realize how big the threat was.There was hostility everywhere, a cool air permeated his body, and he felt lonely like never before.

It is not uncommon for men to pause in moments of suspense, and their minds to be seduced by the inanimate world.There was a fossil embedded in the cliff before Knight's eyes, a bas-relief protruding from the rock.It was the fossil of a creature with two eyes, dead and turned to stone, but even now the fossil would stare at him.This is an early crustacean called a trilobite.Knight and this lower animal were separated by millions of years, but they seemed to meet in this place of death.It was the only thing he could see in his field of vision - had a life, had a body that needed help, like he was now.

Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) Fiction is storytelling, and storytelling by whatever means—words, films, comic strips—always holds the interest of the viewer (the reader) by asking questions and delaying providing answers.Questions fall into two categories: those involving causation (eg, who did it?); and those involving time (eg, what happened later?). Traditional detective stories and adventure stories revolve around these two questions respectively.So suspense is always inseparable from adventure stories, and thrillers, which are a mixture of detective stories and adventure stories.Such stories repeatedly throw the protagonist into extremely dangerous situations, thereby arousing terror and anxiety in the reader, making him eager to know the consequences.

Because suspense is always associated with the popular literary form, it has been dismissed by modern high-level novelists, and it is still regarded as an inferior form.For example, Homer's epic poem "The Odyssey" ends with the account of the hero Odysseus on his return from the Trojan War. This ending is full and full of praise, and the reader is satisfied; The banal, disconnected, and inconsequential events of a day in modern-day Dublin are mixed with a description of Odysseus' return from the Trojan War to suggest that real life is not what conventional fiction would have us believe. Everything will be exciting and have a happy ending.But there are also some prestigious writers, especially in the nineteenth century, who consciously borrowed the suspenseful effect of popular fiction for their own purposes.

Thomas Hardy was such a writer.His first published novel, The Remedy of Despair (1871), was a sensational novel in the style of Virgie Collins.The third novel "A Pair of Blue Eyes" (1873) is very lyrical and pays great attention to psychological description. The book is based on Hardy's love experience with his first wife, and the background is the romantic northern mountainous area of ​​Cornwall .This novel is deeply loved by the master of modern autobiographical novels, Marc Proust.But one classical suspense scene in the book is, as far as I know, completely fictional.The word suspense is derived from Latin and means "to hang".No situation creates more suspense than a person hanging by his fingers from a cliff, with no hope of returning to safety.So its other name is the cliff climber (clill hanger).

In the middle of the story of "A Pair of Blue Eyes", the vicar's daughter, the young and beautiful but a bit skittish heroine Alfred, climbed up to the top of a high cliff with a telescope, from where you can overlook Brisbane. Tor Bay; she wanted to see if the ship from India arrived, and among the passengers was a young architect with whom she had made a personal engagement for life.Accompanying her up the hill was Henry Knight.This person is a friend of her stepmother, older than she, and has more knowledge and interests than her.He had taken the initiative to express his love to Alfred, and the latter was also very fond of him, but sometimes he felt guilty when he thought about it.They were sitting on the top of the cliff at this time, and Knight's hat was blown by the wind and rolled towards the cliff. He hurried after him, but he slipped on a steep slope and couldn't climb up, hundreds of feet below the ground.Elfrid rushes to help him, and the result is worse.She did crawl back to safety, but accidentally sent Nate slipping farther and farther.Knight slowly slid down inch by inch. In desperation, he jumped desperately towards the lowest piece of grass, and finally stopped his further decline.On this protruding grass slope, the grass has withered, and rocks are exposed everywhere.Knight is actually hanging there with his arms on the stone at this time (emphasis added by me).Alfred disappeared from Nate's sight, probably calling for help.But he knew it was miles away from residential areas.

What will happen next?Can Knight be saved?If yes, how to save?Suspense can only be created by delaying the answer.One method of procrastination is the film's usual cross-cutting method (the effect of which Hardy has long anticipated in his visually intense novels), that is, to show Knight's excruciating pain on the one hand and show the heroine on the other. Scenes of panic and haste to rescue him.But Hardy wants Knight (and the reader) to be amazed by Alfred's quick wit, and thus restricts the narrative to Knight's perspective.He expanded the suspense again and again, instead of giving an answer quickly, he described in detail the inner activities that occurred when Knight was hanging on the edge of the cliff, and these inner activities reflected the mentality of Victorian intellectuals.The latest discoveries in geology and the history of natural sciences at that time, especially the writings of Darwin, had a profound influence on these people.In this section, Knight realizes that he is facing a pair of eyes, "dead and turned to stone." Fossilized arthropods from millions of years ago.Only Hardy could have written these words.His work is known for these breathtaking shifts in perspective.In these transfers, he shows how weak the human body is, and how vast and eternal the universe is, which human beings are only just beginning to understand.It is not surprising, then, that his characters sense a cosmic malevolence from this disproportionate proportion, which is understandable, if not without illusion.Alfred's lively, seductive blue eyes disappeared from Knight's vision and were replaced by a pair of dead eyes left on the fossil; thus he gained a new sense of his own mortality. The comprehension, a kind of comprehension full of bitterness and desolation.

The description of the scene continued for several pages, and the method of procrastination remained the same: describing his philosophical reflections on geology, prehistoric archaeology, and at the same time describing the viciousness of nature (the wind whipped Knight's clothes, the rain pierced him). face, the red sun is "slanting drunken eyes" standing by, interspersed with some questions that help to tighten the rope of suspense: "Is he hopeless? ... He hoped to be rescued, but a weak What about the woman? He didn't dare to move an inch. Could it be that the God of Death really stretched out his hand to him?"

Of course Alfred rescued him, but as for how, I won't tell you, except that she had to take off all her clothes.Hopefully this will inspire those of you who haven't read it to give this entertaining novel a serious read.