Comparing Story Openings of Bleak House by Charles Dickens to The Outsi

At the opening of the story 'The Outsider', the writer Albert Camus places time in the wrong order. This creates the impression that we are seeing into the character's thoughts rather than a story being told to us. It works very effectively as the paragraphs are spontaneous and not in any form of order, thus creating a mental picture in our heads of one or two day?s worth of events, as if we were remembering them ourselves. This, however, does not apply to Bleak house. Dickens does not use any form of time, but instead decides to describe what is happening and makes the days, time, week or month irrelevant. It could be any day, but Dickens does not want time to be the focal point of his story. This is effective because our interest is drawn to the descriptions and happenings of the city. Surprisingly, both story start with short, improperly composed sentences, most of the time with little or no verbs. This works differently for each story. In ?The Outsider?, the short, blunt sentences arouse interest that forces you to continue reading, this is because the ?thoughts? of the character are rather cold and blunt about a situation that should be upsetting, for example ?Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday?, as the opening paragraph. The punctuation break up the sentence into emphasized words. Camus directs us to feel slightly disturbed by his descriptions of the events taken place and puts us in the position of psychologist, eager to hear what comes next, but wary of it also. In ?Bleak House? the short, improper sentences create a very descriptive picture of a cold, dark city, the blunt words mimicking the blunt feelings and people in the city. This is very effective as he uses the same words over again to emphasize the poin... ...he Chancellor and Chancery both being the cause and the centre of the fog, paralleling the weather with the situation. Fog is not a good thing in the court of Chancery and the narrator describes the Chancery as having a dark and unclear vision. They are not good at their jobs and the narrator calls the old Chancellor as being ?leaden-headed? or ?stupid? to emphasizing his views on that particular character. Both story openings, although composed differently, draw the reader in. Both author?s, Albert Camus and Charles Dickens, use a variety of techniques, which are all very effective when the author uses them to his will. Either way we get a clear and pointed view of the spot-lit aspects that the author wants us to focus on, and maybe sometime miss the subtle, important information between the lines that are not the centre of attention at that moment in the story.