Compare and contrast the ways in which the atmosphere is created in The Signalman and The Red Room.

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Andrew Coleman 10K                           Monday, 16 December 2002

Compare and contrast the ways in which the atmosphere is created in The Signalman and The Red Room

The two stories, which I will be comparing, will be The Signalman and The Red Room. The stories both have the same genre, horror.

These two stories are both pre-1914 tales, which have all been set in the Victorian age. In these stories we see the coming of the railways in the Dickens story, and we start to see the scientific theory overtake mystery and how Victorian people start to think-rational thought had come about. The red room creates scientific thought by having a room in a very dark castle in an isolated part of the country with only three “old and wrinkly” people who all agree that the castle is “haunted” but they all do not know by whom and a man which is young what represents the new aged people who think and belive that this ghost is a load of “cobblers”. In both stories the author creates loneliness. But the loneliness is slightly different in the stories. In ‘’The Red Room’’ loneliness is illustrated by the fact the man is on his own without companions in the red room. When the candles go out in the middle of the story, the man is scared and screaming then eventually dashes for the ‘’Moonlit corridor. This showed his loneliness. ‘’With my head bowed and my arms over my face, made a run for the door’’. The signalman shows loneliness by the fact that he is solitary and is lacking friends or companions. He is isolated and the area he lives in is far away and in a “solitary” and “dismal” is two words that are used in The Signalman to describe the immediate setting of the story, this arouses the reader’s attention to this unnatural world.

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         These two books are both written by 19th century writers who all had rational thought and did not believe in “ghosts and ghouls” and believe in rational thought with The Red Room being written by H.G. Wells whom also wrote The War of the Worlds, which is a book about life on other planets. At the start of Well’s Red Room we see the scene being set and it is, one of tension with an “old” man having a “withered” arm. This is done so the reader gets a sense of evil, immorality and mystery by making the reader question, ...

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