Now I will go onto “A Christmas Carol”. The details about Marley’s face and appearance that are frightening are his eyes were wide open but motionless, ‘its livid colour, made it horrible, but horror seemed to be in spite’. When Scrooge sees the ghost he feels petrified by echoes in his house. This is shown by ‘ he was not startled, or that his blood was not conscious of a terrible sensation, to which it had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue’. Also this makes the audience feel scared as they wonder what are causing the echoes and what will happen next. It also builds up apprehension and suspense which makes the story more unnerving to the audience.
In the redroom in the past a ‘young duke had died. Or rather, in which begun his dying’. And ‘a timid wife and the tragic end that came to her husband’s jest of frightening her’. The writer has set “The Redroom” in an old house which is inhabited by three old people and is at night time. This creates a spooky and eerie feel and makes the reader think that something horrible might happen.
Now I will go onto the setting of “A Christmas Carol”. The details that make the town seem spooky and eerie are ‘the fog and darkness thickened…clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold had become intense’. Also there was an old church tower, ‘with a gruff old bell which looked down at Scrooge out of a gothic window’. This relevance of this weather is that it sets the scene for a horror story. What is learnt about Scrooge’s rooms is that they are gloomy and are used for business. They are dismal and dreary, ‘They were a gloomy suite of rooms… rooms being all let out as offices’.
The signalman is made to appear nervous and frightened by him saying ‘when you have found it, don’t call out! And when you are at the top don’t call out!’ The signalman is made to seem tired and anxious by ‘hollow eyes’. The signalman was being tormented by the ghost by ‘it calls to me, for many minutes… “Below there! Look out!” It stands waving to me. It rings my little bell’. The signalman has a premonition. It is ‘there is danger overhanging somewhere on the line. Some dreadful calamity will happen’. The signalman is predicting his own death. The reaction of the audience is that they feel sympathy for the signalman as he knows he is going to die. It also creates suspense and anxiety as the audience wait for the death of the signalman.
The signalman’s state of mind is of pain and ‘was most pitiable to see. It was mental torture of a conscientious man’. Dickens builds up the tension by the narrator walking along joyful and happy. Then stopped at ‘the brink and mechanically looked down, from a point at which I had first seen him’. He saw at the tunnel a man waving at him. The horror had struck him as the appearance of the man was a man indeed. A new hut had been built where on had not been there before.
I will next be writing about the minor characters in each story, first starting with “The Redroom”. Each of the old people looks or acts strangely. ‘The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open’. The first old man had a ‘withered arm’. ‘A second old man… more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first’. At the start the old people treat the young man like why do you want to go to into the redroom, they thought he was mad to consider staying in it. At the end the old people treat the man like you are brave and what was it like to stay in the redroom. Also they have smugness towards him. This shows that the room had a horrible effect on the young man. The audience’s reaction to this is that these people did not seem the kind of people to change their opinion easily. This suggests that the room must have been an unpleasant experience for the man.
The old woman says about the house is ‘eight-and-twenty years you have lived and never seen the likes of this house, I reckon… A many thing to see and sorrow for’, she implies that the house is haunted. When the young man asks if someone would show him the room no one is willing to go with him, you can tell this because the first old man says ‘you go alone’. This shows the old people’s attitude towards the room is that they do not like to go there or they are scared of the room.
In conclusion, I think that “The Redroom” ghost story was excellent. At first you wonder why the old people seem scared to go into the redroom then you find out and although it was not you in the story it still scares you as you wonder what awaits him next. Also in the story is a gap between the young man all alone in the darkness to him being found in the morning which creates a sense of mystery and leaves you to wonder was there a ghost or was it not, you just do not know.
“A Christmas Carol”, the setting and characters were described in an eerie and horrifying way that is traditional of a ghost story. The story was well detailed though in places I did not know where the characters were or what was happening. I did not find this frightening, though the third and final ghost was the most terrifying character of all the ghost stories as the ghost ‘was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed its head’, also the spirit did not speak nor move.
“The signalman” had a sense of supernatural events, like when a young woman died instantaneously in one of the compartments, this however might not have had anything to do with a ghost. Also there is insufficient evidence to prove the existence of a ghost, he could be imagining it, like the narrator said ‘this figure must be a deception of his sense of sight’. There might be a ghost or maybe there was not, therefore I did not find this ghost story horrifying.
