What is the effect of the narrative technique (telling the story through letters and journals) in Bram Stoker’s Dracula?

One of the most important effects of the narrative technique employed in Dracula is that it fragments the momentum of a traditional narrative style, and thereby protracts the progression of suspense and horror in the novel. Indeed, the reader is continuously reminded of the vulnerability of these characters by the first-person journalised isolation. Jonathan Harker’s initial comments at the beginning of his account, that he has the ‘impression [of] leaving the West and entering the East’ are accentuated by the latter jumps to the accounts of Mina and Lucy back in England. This serves to disorient the reader to an extent, as the continuous movement from one narrative to another prevents a crystallisation of the nature of Dracula’s terror, keeping him as more of an entity than any tangible foe. Indeed, in one account the Count is crawling ‘down the castle wall’, while in another, he is a charismatic aristocrat, wishing to share in the ‘life’, ‘change’, and ‘death’ of London as an immigrant. Where a single, continuous narrative would struggle to portray the pervasive horror of Dracula as he moves from Transylvania to London, the separate accounts of him elicit a more powerful sense of his inescapability. This is aided by the retrospective nature of the accounts, as the events, such as Lucy’s continued degeneration of ‘pallor’ and spirit, as a sense of inevitability is created in the story. Indeed, Stoker strengthens the pervasiveness of the Count’s growing threat by interjecting the entries of the main characters with dry and factual reports from the ‘The Dailygraph’ that are pasted into the journals of some characters, which, because Dracula exists not only in the biased and unpredictable accounts of the main characters, adds a sense of realness to the horror, allowing it to escape the confines of human imagination and place it in a palpable reality.