There is then a passage where the narrator and the signalman get acquainted. In this passage the suspense dies down a little. However, there are still the references to the supernatural to keep the atmosphere. The references are a little ambiguous in the sense that they could be supernatural or it could just be he reader interpreting them as such because of the descriptions that have come before. It is the latter that is true. This is because the hellish descriptions before have the primed the reader to receive more supernatural references and so it is almost as if the reader goes to look for them in the text. This is a good way of keeping the suspense in what is an ‘ordinary’ part of the story. The references I am referring to are the fire that refers to hell. The fire also gives us a cliché – ‘the story by the fire.’ The ‘grave, dark regrets’ and the ‘rising.’ Rising from what? The dead? The signalman sending the messages seems so isolated. Nobody knows who he is and people only know of him through his messages. The classic example of a person who would see a ghost, a person who nobody really knows and someone who is always alone. He is also ‘anxious.’ He seems almost paranoid or worried. Is he having the experience at that time? This is when he checks the danger-light when the bell has NOT rang. Not emphasised by all capitals, the narrator is definitely sure of this and Dickens wants the reader to be sure of it to. The ‘halloa’ phrase is repeated again to give further backing up of the supernatural. The signalman also asks the narrator whether ‘they were conveyed to him in a supernatural way?’ This give the reader the backing up of suspense needed and also reminds the reader of the phrase as well as highlighting its importance. He then leaves the man but with the ‘chills’ behind him like something else is there with him.
When the narrator returns to meet the signalman again we get the revelation of the ghost. Again Dickens uses the ‘eerie’ lexis to get over his point about the ghost. The signalman gives the description of the spectre ‘…-violently waved.’ The violence is there to prove the point of the ghost and also to add more suspense about it. ‘Gesticulating, with the utmost passion and vehemence.’ This is again used to add to the scariness of the story. Dickens effectiveness is gained by the continuous usage of powerful lexis and strong deep descriptions. The disappearance of the spectre as the signalman got closer to it also gives for a better yarn since it keeps the mystery. The position of the spectre is also important since it is at the mouth of the tunnel or the entrance to the other side, the entrance to the darkness. ‘…The slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine’ the narrator believes the story, or at least is scared by it and so is trying to find rational answers to control his fear. Philosophically that is what people have always done. Trying to find answers to things because when they do not they fear it. People fear the unknown; the spectre is the epitome of the unknown. The spectre had a purpose, the warning of the crash. This is what makes it scarier. The second coming of the spectre also heralded a warning. The fact that a beautiful woman died makes it scarier somehow. I do not know why, and that is why it makes it scarier and more effective, the unknown.
There is a further telling of the story again with all the suspense as before. The narrator starts asking a lot of questions– trying to answer the unanswerable. The signalman is confiding in the narrator and is asking him for help. This is due to the cultural and social influences of that time. In those days the well-off and the well-educated people were considered in high regard and so their opinions were valued so that is the reason why the signalman asks the narrator for his advice, ‘what can I do?’ Also, this explains the reason why the signalman addresses the narrator as sir because of his higher social class and standing.
The best bit in the story is the end. The whole of the story has been building up to this and all the haunting and the repetition of the key phrase of ‘halloa!’ The narrator comes back to see the signalman and looks down into the cutting. ‘I cannot describe the thrill that seized upon me, when close at the mouth of the tunnel, I saw the appearance of a man, with his left sleeve across his eyes, passionately waving his right arm.’ The word ‘thrill’ and ‘seized’ suggest a great power, enough to grab the narrator; the power of the supernatural. Then you have the appearance at the ‘mouth of the tunnel’ this was clearly described as the entrance to hell and the place from which the spectre originally came. The mouth of this tunnel is also the darkest place and it seems fitting that the appearance of the man should be there. Also, the word appearance is used instead of spectre. Spectre means it is a ghost, whereas appearance suggests it could be a ghost but does not rule out the possibility of it being a normal human (which it turns out to be), a bit of narrative craft. The action however, is the primary way in which the suspense and fear is added. The reader feels a sense of déjà vu. A sense of fear and recollection as they think back to the signalman’s description of the spectre’s actions. This is a clever stylistic trick and shows the narrative craft of the Dickens as he manages to link two apparently supernatural things together to make one exciting climax. We then have the phrase ‘nameless horror’ this refers back to the points I made about things that are unanswerable and things that cannot be rationalised. ‘…Was a man indeed’ this releases all the suspense but by now the reader is ready to receive the explanation to the story.
‘With an …something was wrong, - with a flashing self-reproachful fear that fatal…’ The narrator knows that something has happened and is rushing to see what it could be. When he gets there he finds out that the signalman has been killed. The narrator then gives a barrage of questions, it is like he cannot just accept the death of the signalman and he needs to know what happened. This is where we get the revelation of the story, what the whole story is leading up to. The train driver said the same things as the spectre and the narrator. He also made the exact same gesture as the spectre. This is where we found out what the whole story was leading up to, this sense of déjà vu. Now we are told that the spectre was warning him of his imminent death. However, what is curious is that the narrator also said that exact same phrase ‘below there!’ Was he perhaps, as the signalman had said, possessed himself and was that what caused him to say what he did? Was he part of the warning? Was he meant to help? The deliberate mystery is left at the end; this is highly effective as it keeps the reader thinking about the story long after they have finished reading and keeps it in line with the rest of the story that is full of mystery. Dickens is almost asking us to make our own conclusions that, I feel, is the right conclusion to give the story. One definite moral issue that comes about is the issue of our dreams and visions. Do they mean something? Should we take them more seriously? Also, the issue of the déjà vu is raised. It definitely happens, I myself have experienced it, but why?
The second story is called ‘The Ghost’ and it is by Richard Hughes. It is a ghost story with a twist. You could say it is a story about intense love and the complexity of the mind (see later). The language used is easy to understand and generally the sentences are kept relatively short. This gives a story a fast pace. Hughes also uses italic style font when he wants to emphasise a word. Parenthesis of words is used frequently in this story for emphasis. An example of these is ‘He never was:’ Where the colon blocks off the phrase and the italics emphasise the he.
This story has a very dramatic start – ‘He killed me quite easily…’ The start gets you straight into the action and get you thinking about death and the ghost straight. ‘Crashing’ - loud, onomatopoeic word. Then we have the word bang in italics and with an exclamation mark. This is supposed to add to the crashing but I feel it is not needed and instead of adding to it reduces its effect and kills the suspense. The word bang is repeated to represent her head being crashed to the ground. ‘…Everything went out.’ We now believe her to be dead. This is a good trick since as the story goes on you find out that she is not. However, at this point in time, the reader is convinced of her death. Especially, when ‘my sleek young soul’ is added to it. The word soul indicates her death and the supernatural and the ghost begins to enter the story. The murdered girl decides that she will haunt the man. We hear her thoughts about ghosts and how she wants to haunt the man that killed her. Hughes uses some eerie words to try and build up some suspense, words like ‘spirit’ and ‘fear.’ However, I do not believe that this story is about creating fear. It is about the ghosts in our mind and about how the woman’s mind is working. That is why Hughes uses lots of colons, dashes etc to try and get the abruptness of the stream of consciousness and also to convey a new thought just jumping in.
‘John stood up…’ was John ever down? I do not think he was. This is how we get subtle signs of the fact that the narrator is not actually dead and that parts of the story are not fact but her minds interpretation of them. ‘Who’s that?’ Hughes gives us signs such as the previous quote that the narrator is not actually dead. These signs are subtle and at first glance do not seem to be giving anything away. However, when we get the ending revealed to us the reader can relate back to these signs and then work out that she was not dead after all. This is a good use of language and so at first convinces the reader of the narrator’s death but then gives the hints of her being alive. This means that when the reader reads the final ending it means that they can look back and realise that there was evidence to suggest she was alive. The narrator’s outburst, which is heard by the people in the street, is also the first sign of her pending insanity and the shock at what she has done (killing John). It is almost as if her mind cannot accept it and so creates an alternate reality in which she is dead. Hughes gives us lots of these outbursts to suggest this insanity that we only really understand at the end.
Despite the fact that Hughes is not writing a scary story he still uses words like ‘silent’, ‘death’, ‘ghost’ etc to give the required atmosphere for the story. He also makes everything dark. Hughes uses this because he knows that this a sure fire way to get the atmosphere he wants and so says ‘Lily Lane was all shadows.’ There is no way to explain why people have a latent fear of the dark but Hughes knows that they do and so exploits it to suggest the supernatural. ‘Leave him, Millie, leave him alone before it is too late!’ Hughes shows the conflict between her two minds, the sane and the insane. What is left of the sane mind knows what is going on and is trying to stop Millie from doing something she might regret. This conflict of the mind is something that happens in everyday life and Hughes uses this in his story. However, in the story it is the conflict between sanity and insanity.
‘So I stretched up my two arms, and tried to float into the air.’ Millie is trying to get up onto heaven. This is where we start to get the discovery that Millie is not really dead. Her sane mind is taking her to the police station whilst her insane mind is trying to get to heaven. Then we have the real dramatic section of the story. Millie is in the police station and her sane mind has come to give her in whilst the insane mind rants and raves about how she did not do it. It is here that Hughes is at his most effective. Millie is shouting and screaming since she is denial about what she has done and so is screaming about what she thinks she is seeing. Hughes writes phrases that can be taken in two ways, it could be her admission of guilt – ‘I didn’t mean to do it!’ – or as a sign that she did not mean to drive him to drive John to the police station. Also the way Hughes uses short sharp sentences and exclamations to get dramatics is highly effective and invokes a lot of feeling when reading. The eyewitness then provides the evidence that she did actually do it and that is the twist conclusion to the story. ‘They’ll not hang her,’ this final statement brings in the moral conflict of whether capital punishment is right or wrong.
This story deals with the love of the girl and the way in which she was pushed over the edge of insanity when she found that her boyfriend had been with another woman. It drove her to breaking pint and so she ended up killing John, her boyfriend. It also deals with the fact that she had a great love for him and how she could not deal with herself when she had killed him. So instead of accepting it her mind made an alternate reality for her. The ghost in this story is the woman’s conscience not allowing her to believe what she has done. Also, there is a reversal of roles in this story whereby there is the woman killing the man as oppose to the man killing the woman which is what usually occurs.
The third story is a very different sort of ghost story it is not scary, thrilling or full of suspense. In fact the reader does not know it is about a ghost until the last two paragraphs. The story starts off by a river. There is alliteration used in the first line ‘stepping stone’. ‘Remembering each one’, the word remembering suggest that the person has been away and now has come back to birthplace. Rhys refers to each individual stone reminiscing about the story and memory of each one. Getting over the river is almost like a rite of passage. It could also be likened to the river Styx in the ancient Greek mythology. The river that needed to be crossed before you could enter the underworld. The slippery stone could be the test to see whether the person crossing (into the underworld) was worthy enough to get past.
Rhys has constant suggestion that the place that she had come back to was definitely the place of her youth but there was something different, something wrong, something amiss. Rhys gives the impression that there was an air of transgression around the place. Like something had been moved when it should not have. The phrase ‘a fine day’ suggests that this was as she left it and that everything was very much okay. This is an effective way of doing this since often we associate a bright clear day and plenty of light as being good. However, the ‘she didn’t remember’ phrase suggests that something was out of place. Also, this effect is further achieved by means of not being able to describe it clearly; the strange, unknown things are things that unsettle people. ‘Her heart began to beat’ this gives us a pause for thought, as we often associate a beating heart with the preparation for fear.
There is then the appearance of the boy and the girl. ‘…Instinctively longing to touch them’. This could be a sign of her being alone, needs to reach out to someone. Dead people are alone. Then we get confirmation of her being a ghost. Rhys uses yet another classic analogy whereby death and ghosts are associated with cold. ‘Hasn’t it gone cold all of a sudden?’ We also have the fact that she cannot be seen as a sign that she is a ghost – ‘his expression didn’t change.’ This story is very effective at what it does. It does not set out to try and scare the reader like most ghost stories. Instead it sets out to make the reader think and try and make them come up with their own conclusions. Rhys achieves this by keeping the story a little ambiguous. There is no clear meaning to the story. My own view is that this story is almost a rite of passage, however, not one through life but from life to death. In my opinion the person in the story has to come back to her youth and see her home one more time before she can let go and head off to where ever she is bale to rest. Rhys also invites to look differently at ghosts. Too often ghosts are considered to be evil, dangerous and bad things but here the ghost is simply innocent and is just in between levels. This is almost challenging us to change our moral views about life and death, especially death.
If we compare stories then this will further highlight the points made above. Firstly I am going to compare the Dickens story with the Hughes story. The first thing to point out is the fact that the Dickens story is longer than the Hughes story. Also, they run at different paces. ‘The Signalman’ is at fairly slow pace and a lot of care and time is taken in the setting of the scene and the descriptions. Whereas the Hughes story goes at a much faster pace, this is in part due to the style of writing. In ‘The Ghost’ getting over the punchy thoughts of Mille is the main purpose and so the sentences are shorter and the descriptions less vivid making for a faster pace to the story. Mille is also not as educated as the narrator of ‘The Signalman’ and so the language used is different. Dickens used more complex Latinate language where Hughes tends to more simple lexis. The Latinate language used by Dickens is typical of the style of writing of that era and so that is partly why the difference occurs.
The atmospheres of the two stories are very similar; both authors set their stories in the dead of night to give that scary dramatic edge to the poem. However, the atmosphere of the Dickens story is far more intense and thrilling than that of the Hughes story. This is due in part to the fact that Dickens spends more time describing and laying on tension than Hughes does. Dickens uses a lot of ‘traditional’ scary words to describe his story. Dickens uses long lists of adjectives and strong verbs all together to get the desired effect. The Hughes descriptions are far less structured and are very loose leaving it to the imagination of the reader. Perhaps this is because the readers’ imagination has increased over the 80 or so years gap between the two stories. The people reading the Hughes book in the 1940s might have been far better at imagining things for themselves whereas the people who read Dickens’ story perhaps needed it to tell them exactly what everything looked like.
This difference in culture and social habits is highlighted further when we compare the two policemen. The policeman in ‘The Signalman’ would consider himself to be a ‘police officer’ and speaks with the ‘proper’ technique. He speaks in a matter of fact manner and does not divulge of the topic and keeps his sentences short. Whereas the policeman in the Hughes story would consider himself to be a ‘copper’ and speaks using slang terms and in a common accent. This highlights the difference in the times when the two stories were written.
If we compare the Dickens story with the story written by Rhys we can see many major differences. Obviously the thing that stands out the most is the length of the two stories. ‘The Signalman’ is some thirteen pages whereas ‘I Used to Live Here Once’ is just the one side. They also have completely different purposes and atmospheres. The Dickens story is very Gothic in its atmosphere it uses darkness and terror to get over its point. Its purpose is to scare us and give us a good thrill when reading the story. It is one of those that you read late at night in relative darkness. However, the Rhys story is on the opposite side of the spectrum. It is no less atmospheric, but its atmosphere is one of a blue sky and sunshine not the night and darkness. The Rhys story breaks from the norm. It does not want us to be scared about ghosts but instead wants us to think about them as human beings with feelings. The styles used by the authors are surprisingly similar considering the difference in purposes to the story. They both use similes, metaphors and imagery. Dickens has the black tunnel and the red danger-light, whilst Rhys has her stepping-stones and river. However, as you can imagine, Rhys having such a short story does not us the long lists of descriptive words like Dickens. Instead she uses one clear description and then continues. The language used is very different. This is in part due to the differences in writing style of the two eras. The Dickens story uses the long Latinate words where as the Rhys story tends use more simple lexis that is easier to understand and follow. The Rhys story is in third person and so the thoughts and feelings are conveyed via the author’s descriptions. The Dickens story however is in the first person and so we hear all relevant feelings through the narrators thought. This gives the story a much more personal touch and so makes you feel more involved as appose to just looking on.
Lastly, we can compare the Rhys story and the Hughes story. Again there is a difference I length with the Rhys story at only one side in length. There is great difference in the purpose and atmosphere of the stories. This was highlighted above. Although the Rhys story is short and so has less in total amounts of description I feel it is better described than the Hughes story. With the Hughes story a lot is left to guess work and reader interpretation. The language used in very similar, both stories use simple, easy to understand lexis. Feelings are portrayed differently because of the difference in perspective. It is the same difference as mentioned above. The Hughes story uses italics and parenthesis to emphasise words where as Rhys relies syntax and short sentences to make her point. She also uses the dialogue to make the point that she needs to.
Overall, I preferred the Dickens story this was simply because I felt it was the best yarn out of the three. I think that most boys of around 16 will like it. It is the kind of thrilling story that pubescent boys of that age adore. Although at times difficult to understand with perseverance it proves to be a very good story. The other two stories both invoke feeling and make you think but the Dickens story, for me at least, just had the edge of the other two with its in depth descriptions and complete immersion into the culture of that time. That is why it appealed to me the most.