The language used is archaic and is written in the first person. The story is very verbose, descriptive and lengthy. Edgar uses vivid and gruesome language building up tension and then relaxing again which symbolises the movement of a pendulum.
The Signalman is a short, Victorian ghost story written by Charles Dickens. The story is set in a railway cutting near the end of a tunnel. The story is about a train signalman who gets a visit from a man. The man is told about the signalman’s vision of a ghost and how the ghost troubles him. This area is well described by Dickens as a cold, dark, damp and lonely place. There is particular emphasis on the loneliness of the place where the signalman spends a lot of his time and this makes the reader feel a bit sorry for him. Dickens also emphasises the dark and the damp in this deep railway cutting, he does this mainly at the start of the story to set the scene, but all the way through he makes little references to the atmosphere and general mood of the railway cutting. Dickens uses words such as ‘clammy’, ‘oozier’ and ‘wetter’ these words are all words that describe the cutting to be dull and depressing already giving the reader a unease feeling about the setting. Dickens descriptive sentences and lengthy paragraphs attract the reader’s attention. Dickens also uses lots of dark words like ‘solitary’ this shows the signalman must be lonely, ‘dungeon’ illustrates that he is imprisoned in his job. The words ‘depressing’ and ‘foreboding’ are used to make the setting seem dangerous and dramatic it creates a more intense atmosphere. The line ‘ a dripping wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky’ is used to make the signalman appear as if he had been imprisoned in his job.
The language is intense, the words ‘monstrous’, ‘saturnine’ and ‘spirit’ are words that create an out of the ordinary atmosphere it also gives a sense of remorseful story line. The signalman has many examples of alliteration, ‘A flashing self- reproachful fear that fatal mischief’ the repetition of the ‘f’’ emphasizes the words ‘fatal’ and ‘fear’ and makes our minds pay attention to these word, leaving us with suspense. Tension is increased when a train passes ‘Just then came a vague vibration in the earth and air, quickly changing into a violent pulsation, and an oncoming rush that caused me to start back, as thought it had forced to draw me down. When such a vapour as rose to my height from this rapid train had passed me’. At this point the tension is dramatically increased, it builds up suspense until we meet the signalman again. The story is constructed so that both the narrator and the reader are kept in suspense about what is going to happen next. It is set over a period of three days and although the days carry straight on from one another we are kept in suspense, as we have to wait until the narrator has described the atmosphere and walked down the cutting until we know what is going to happen next. Suspense is how this story starts with ‘Halloa! Below there!’ from this we do not know who is calling, or whom they are calling to this makes the reader ask questions about the story and what is going to happen next. Dickens uses anachronistic language and writes in the 3rd person.
The characters in both stories are paranoid, superstitious and despair. In ‘the signalman’ we can see everything through his eyes, we see his worry and feel his ‘feverish distress’ about the future, which lures the reader to read more and keeping them in suspense. In ‘The pit and the pendulum’ the narrator did not seem particularly concerned when he saw the sight of his own certain death swinging above him – “While I gazed upwards at it (for it as position was directly above my own) I fancied that I saw it in motion”. But as the pendulum dropped, his language became much more descriptive and intense – “Down – still unceasingly – still inevitably down!” It gripped you more and makes you want to read on. Maybe this is why he had so many occasions in his stories when he was irate or mad, so the reader became gripped and more interested. He often uses similes and metaphors, which also helps and makes symbols using characters or objects he mentions, for example, in ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’, he describes the candles on a table, as angels, next to the jury that was about to sentence him to death by torture, as images of the devil. The emotions were very well portrayed and very detailed vocabulary was used. For example- ‘I was sick- sick unto death with that long agony; and when that at length unbound me, and I was permitted to sit, I felt that my senses were leaving me’. The emotions that the narrators felt affected the stories and the more descriptive they were, the more you could picture them and the more the story came to life in your imagination. The signalman was described as ‘A dark swallow man, with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows’ the references like ‘dark’ and ‘heavy’ add to the mystery and suspense as darkness is associated with the horror theme. Dickens wants us to remain in suspense till the very end.
Horror is one of the most popular genres for fiction stories and one that many people enjoy for many reasons. The supernatural and psychological aspects of the stories provoke a lot of thought in people and trigger such emotions as terror and fear while enthralling and chilling the reader and making them read on. The short story’s popularity is still growing to this day, probably due to our hectic lifestyle where time is a rare luxury. It’s much easier to get involved in the plot of a short story than a lengthy novel. Short stories are frequently based around the unexplained, and sometimes will not give an explanation for this at all. These stories tend to be very descriptive this helps set the scene, and also adds to the overall atmosphere of the story. Vivid accounts of characters’ emotions are also used to create a sense of suspense, and in some cases uncertainty. In both stories the horror genre was successfully achieved as the authors kept the reader in suspense till the very end and concerned to find out what will happen next.
