Excerpts: 1) It was the meanest moment of eternity. A minute before she was just a scared human being fighting for its life. Now she was her sacrificing self with Tea Cake's head in her lap. She had wanted him to live so much and he was dead. No hour is ever eternity, but it has its right to weep.
(Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God)
2) Outside it was getting dark. The streetlight came on outside the window. The two men at the counter read the menu. From the other end of the counter Nick Adams watched them. He had been talking to George when they came in.
(Ernest Hemingway, "The Killers")
3) She seated herself to write to her husband. The letter he would get in the morning, and she would be with him at night. What would he say? How would he act? She knew that he would forgive her, for had he not written a letter? . . . What did he mean by withholding that letter? How dared he not have sent it?
(Kate Chopin, "A Night in Acadie")
4) For the truth was, it was extremely refreshing to be out in the summerhouse after many continuous days in the main building and neither of us was inclined to hurry with our tasks. Indeed, although one could not see out far that day on account of the encroaching mist, and the daylight too was rapidly fading by this stage, . . . I remember our often breaking off from our respective activities simply to gaze out at the views around us.
(Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day)
Answer: 1 and 2
Explanation:
When we are talking about the intense and suspenseful mood it is referring to a mood creating by the writer when it can cause anxiety, urgency and intense feeling when the readers are reading the text.
- The first excerpt is describing a scared woman facing the dead which is surely causing the anxiety mood in readers and also the start of it which it says that it is a ''meanest moment of eternity''.
- In the second excerpt, we can see an intense situation that is happening in the dark and often dark in literature is representing that something bad will happen so the readers are waiting to know what it is which is also causing sort of anxiety in them.