The fantastic lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to the reader and the character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. At the end of the story, the reader makes a decision even if the character does not; opts for one or the other solution, thus emerging from the fantastic. If he decides that the laws of reality remain intact and allow an explanation of the phenomena described, we say that the work belongs to another genre: the uncanny. If, on the contrary, he decides that new laws of nature must be taken into consideration to account for the phenomena, we enter the genre of the marvelous. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay - Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic, p. 42Bram Stoker's Dracula belongs to all three genres mentioned by Todorov. The first chapters exemplify the fantastic; but as the narrative progresses, the characters try to realize the mysterious truth about the events that overwhelm them, events that ultimately give way to the marvelous. Chapter I is a great example of the fantastic: the narrator cannot make sense of his surroundings. He uses his Victorian wisdom to rationalize events, but ultimately hesitation and perplexity cloud his rational thinking. Let's pretend we don't know what will happen in the following chapters; let's also pretend not to know what the Count really is. I say "pretend" because the pretense is necessary to allow us to share the character's fantastic observations of incidents - from his journey from Bistritz across the Borgo Pass to Dracula's castle. In Chapter I Jonathan is presented as a naive narrator, placing every detail of the East and its customs in his diary; but there are moments when its indisputable nave faces a strangeness that defies explanation. This results in an uncomfortable feeling of something bothering both Jonathan and the reader. For example, when the host's wife puts the rosary around his neck, he feels what Todorov calls "hesitation", the characteristic feeling of the fantastic: "Whether it is the fear of the old lady, or the many ghostly traditions of this place, or the crucifix itself, I don't know, but I don't feel as comfortable as usual." We naive readers are equally uncertain about the cause of this feeling of the fantastic. To create a sense of the fantastic the author often makes the central character unaware of the things that the other characters know because it is through the character that we witness the events. But this is not dramatic irony as dramatic irony requires the audience or reader to know more than the character knows; in fantastic irony, however, the reader is as ignorant as the character. Thus, on his journey from Bistritz to Borgo Pass, Jonathan's traveling companions seem to know more about his impending fate than he or the reader. Typically, no one tells him about the real danger of daring to meet Count Dracula. Their dark warning gestures, punctuated by frequent acts of crossing themselves, only add to the fantastical nature of his journey. The fantastic is the main component of any thriller, literary or cinematic, and the ending of a thriller is disturbing (strange) but ultimately explainable by natural laws, as in Hitchcock's Psycho) or wonderful (out of this world and explained only by of something more than simple human reason, as is the case with any decent horror film). The fantastic arouses a feeling that numbs the faculty of drawing direct conclusions, and the characteristic expression associated with the visual fantastic is., 1975.