In this piece of coursework I am going to compare and contrast two short stories. The first story I am going to look at is 'The Red Room' and the second is 'The Signalman'.

Authors Avatar

Short story coursework

In this piece of coursework I am going to compare and contrast two short stories. The first story I am going to look at is ‘The Red Room’ and the second is ‘The Signalman’. I will look at these stories and then compare them making sure that I mention the setting, creation of suspense, genre, style of writing and the language used.

   ‘The Signalman is a short story by Charles Dickens and ‘The Red Room’ is another short story by H.G.Wells. These two stories are related in the way that they both use a ghostly theme throughout the story.

‘The Red Room’ is a short story about a room which is believed to be haunted by ghosts. In the story a man volunteers to stay in the red room overnight to prove that there are no ghosts in the room. At the beginning of the story the man seems very confident but when he starts his stay in the red room he begins to get so frightened that he injures himself in the process of running out of the room. At the end of the story he comes to a conclusion that it is not a ghost that haunts the room but fear itself.’ The Signalman is also a short story with a ghostly theme. There is a man who meets the signalman. The signalman tells the man about ghostly occurrences which have been happening in the cutting and also about warnings that the ghosts have been giving. At the end of the story the signalman dies on the tracks due to his belief in ghosts.

‘The Signalman’ contains a man who is presumably out walking when he comes across a steep cutting with a railway at the bottom. At the base of the cutting is a figure that the ma shouts down to, “but instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself around and looked down the line”. This is the first ghostly event which reminds us that this is a ghost story and builds tension because we know that this is a ghost story. This figure is a signalman who rambles something about ghosts and then tells the man to come back the next day. this strange behavior is just part of the network of occurrences that build up to the final ghostly event.

Join now!

   These two characters meet in the same place the next day where the signalman talks about ghostly warnings and accidents that have occurred after and maybe due to these warnings. At this point he tells the man about recent a ghostly warning but nothing had yet happened due to this and that he was worried about what might happen. This gives a feeling of dread in the same way that the old people in ‘The Red Room’ do when they say you are not going to stay there on this night because it implies that something is going to ...

This is a preview of the whole essay