Another way that Dickens builds up tension in the story is that when the signalman is talking to the narrator he does not tell him the whole story until the next day so therefore you have to wait so it leaves us on a bit of a cliff-hanger.
Dickens also builds up tension by the signalman telling the man that he should not call out to him, this builds up a lot of tension as we do not as yet know why he asks him not to call out.
When the signal man tell the narrator about the first appearance of the ghost it is quite strange and a large coincidence because we find out that what the narrator shouted at the start was the same as what the ghost shouts which is a big shock and you can see this from the signalman’s reaction as he does not look at the narrator but he looks around to the red light in the tunnel as if he has heard the ghost again.
When the first accident happens Dickens builds up the tension by using dark depressing words again like “wet stains stealing, frozen finger and a disagreeable shudder crept over me” These are very appropriate as the accident is about to happen, you also get the feeling that something is going to happen because of those words.
Something that also builds tension is that every time the ghost appears something happens which means that the readers are always on the edge of they’re seat and also causes a lot of suspense, the two things that happen is when the first train went by after seeing the ghost there is a big train crash and after the second ghost appears the lady falls out of the train and dies.
After the ghost has appeared twice you get the feeling that the ghost will appear for a third time this also creates tension as you are waiting for the ghost to appear for the third time and eventually we find out that something bad eventually does happen.
We start to feel sorry for the signalman because he becomes very scared and it looks as if he starts to fell trapped, a quote the shows he is suffering is “the mental torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life” and later we find out the only way he can free himself from his “mental torture” is to kill himself.
The interesting part of the story is at the end when the signalman dies. What is unusual about his death is that when the train killed him he did not seem to take any notice of the train or the driver who was trying to warn him because he wanted to die to stop someone else from dieing because every time he sees the ghost something bad happens so he takes his own life to save someone else and also to free himself, another reason could be that his eyes are fixated on the spectre and he is in a trance so he cant move out of the way. This is strange because the driver is making the same motions and same shouts as the ghost made. This therefore makes us think that when he sees the ghost earlier in story he is having a premonition of his own death.
