Suspense In Free Radicals And Alice Munroe's The Flowers That Killed Him

Suspense is a key element in a story that keeps the reader engaged and interested. It places them on the edge of their seat and encourages them to continue reading. The mystery genre is an excellent genre that uses suspense as a key element of storytelling, and Alice Munroe’s “Free radicals” and Sinclair Ross’ “The Flowers That Killed Him” are two short stories that also keeps the reader in a constant state of uncertainty. Both stories achieve placing their readers in a constant state of anxiety but they use different literary devices to achieve that. With Munroe’s short story, she uses the narrative, dialogue, and backstory to entice the reader into reading further. As for Ross, he uses focalisation, diction, and allusions. While the two authors …show more content…
Nita is an elderly woman whose husband, Rich, suddenly away while he was out to the hardware store and she has been shutting herself away from her friends. She “threw out any sympathy note she happened to get” (Munroe) and insists that she’s fine when she’s clearly in depression. This allows for the reader to understand her grief and it would not be seen as a tactic to build up suspense, at least if the entire background only revolved around her depression. Instead, it also reveals that Nita met Rich while she was working at a registrar’s office and cheated with him on his current wife of the time, Bett. She and Rich engaged in sexual acts while he was still married and she accidentally left her sunglasses at his home for Bett to find. It discloses that Nita isn’t necessarily an innocent woman and that she had actively destroyed another woman’s marriage. The narrative also makes the reader question the reliability of Nita and her intentions. It mentions that Nita did not intentionally leave her glasses behind but also Bett “could not believe that” (Munroe). It places a sense of doubt within Nita, all the more so when the narrative reveals that Rich went to the doctor a week prior to his death and was perfectly healthy. Munroe cleverly set up the beginning of the story to question Nita’s innocent acts, such as why she would close herself off from her friends or why she was afraid to talk about the grieving process with her friends. Was she trying to distance herself away from her peers because she preferred to mourn in peace and not to let anyone worry? Or was she trying to avoid outing herself as her husband’s murderer? It builds doubt within the reader and makes them wonder if any of her depression is true or not, even more so once she begins to tell a story about her murdering someone. While it’s revealed at the end that this story was