Discuss how the narrative structure contributes to the creation of suspense in "The Paperhanger." Do not simply summarize the story—identify and analyze the important markers closely. While much of this question is based on choices the writer has made, your conclusions can and should be expressed through an informed and well-reasoned opinion supported by specific examples from the text.

William Gay begins his story "The Paperhanger" with the narrator stating that a child's disappearance years earlier had been a "cataclysmic" event. This establishes both that the disappearance had occurred and that it had a significant impact on the woman whose reactions are next described. From that point forward, the narrative proceeds in chronological sequence from the "tawdry and banal" events before the disappearance. By describing those events as also "freighted with menace, a foreshadowing" of what came after, the narrator implies that the story will not have a happy ending. The woman—who is the subject of the narrative, it is soon clarified—was the mother of the girl who vanished. "She had been quarreling with the paperhanger," the narrator states, leading the reader to believe that their disagreement played a role in the girl's vanishing.
The dialogue between mother and paperhanger includes both insults and sexual innuendo. While she is angry because she thinks he has cheated her, he mocks her. The woman, who is from Pakistan, speaks English with an accent. She is upper-class—described as a "doctor's wife"—and calls the worker "trash" and "scum." The child, Zeineb, is not only present but physically involved, as her fingers are playing with the man's long hair. After her mother storms out of the room, the narrator suggests a further bond between child and man:

Her face glowed with a strange constrained glee, as if she and the paperhanger shared some secret the rest of the world hadn't caught onto yet.

In this way, although this section of the story was supposedly about the mother's memories, the narrator introduces things that the mother had not seen. The reader must wonder if these are the mother's imaginings or the man's memories.
As the mother enters another room, we learn that two more men, the builder and the electrician, are hanging a light fixture. The mother then goes outside and starts her car; a fourth man is working on the landscaping. Zeineb does not come when she calls. From this point, the mystery is established: "Where is my child?" the mother wants to know when she re-enters the house, but Zeineb cannot be found when she and the three men inside search the whole house.
From this mysterious disappearance, the tone switches to the clinical investigation of a police search and the perspective of the doctor when he arrives home. He blames his wife for the disappearance of their daughter. The reader also learns more of the paperhanger's perspective; his initial impression of the mother had been that she was flirting with him but then disdaining him:

[T]here was an arrogance about her that cried out to be taken down a notch or two.

Yet there is a sexual tension, at least in his recollection; he had made a crude gesture toward her, and yet she had re-hired him. This ambiguous interaction, along with his highly critical stance and obvious awareness of class differences, leads the reader to suspect his involvement.
As the search is called off for the night and the scene shifts into the paperhanger's neighborhood, the narrator offers more information that makes him seem suspicious. The area is described as "dark and forlorn" and "grim and dark,"—these can only be ominous signs, and the story becomes almost Gothic. It is revealed that he had dug up graves in an old cemetery, and the narrator even describes this activity by comparing him to a child: "The bones he laid out like a child with a Tinkertoy . . ."
As the search turns up no child, alive or dead, it eventually ends. One of the workers, the backhoe operator, tells the police that the paperhanger is the most likely suspect : "one sick puppy," but no further explanation is given. The abandoned house is described as gaining "an unhealthy, diseased reputation." The doctor and his wife grow apart, and one day she just leaves. And as abruptly, the narrative changes course. The wife seeks out the paperhanger, wanting him to help her search for her child. They begin to speak of unreal things: he mentions a man who vanished into thin air, and she scornfully refers to fairy stories. After she leaves, he sees a child watching him from the distance:

at the edge of the yard, a tiny sepia child with an intent sloe-eyed face, as real as she had ever been.

At this point, the story has veered even further toward fantasy.
The strangest twist comes next. As the mother returns, the paperhanger takes her into the woods and the cemetery to look for the girl, and they end up having a sexual liaison. While the reader sees this as an indication of her breakdown—and the paperhanger himself says she has now come "down to his level"—it may be that she suspected the truth. After she confesses wanting closure more than anything else, he delivers the child's dead body to her.