Throughout the story, hints are dropped that something ‘darker’ will take place. Roald Dahl doesn’t give away anything during the story but the subtle keeps you reading to find out what will happen next. At the end it makes you think that Mary Maloney might have still been in some kind of shock, but the last sentence reads, “And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle.” The word ‘giggle’ makes her sound like a little girl at the fact that she has done something naughty and nobody would ever know. It’s the last sentence that makes you realise how psychotic Mary Maloney really is.
Mary Maloney is a six – month pregnant woman who loves her husband very much, this part of the story shows how infatuated she is with him, “for her, this was a blissful time of day. She knew he didn’t want to speak much until the first drink was finished and she, on her side, was content to sit quietly, enjoying his company after the long hours alone in the house, she loved to luxuriate in the presence of this man, and to feel – almost as a sunbather feels in the sun – that warm male glow that came out of him to her when they were alone together.” Knowing all this, it comes as a shock when Mary kills her husband. There is no feeling of anger, jealousy, hate or even sadness. “Alright, she told herself. So I’ve killed him.”
Roald Dahl’s choice of words are always very effective, for example, hints of tension rising are found in the transition from ice cubes in Mr Maloney’s glass ‘tinkling’ to ‘clinking’ as he sets the glass down. Roald Dahl is very good at keeping you wondering what will happen next. His plots are well thought out so at the start you are made to feel safe, then gradually, dropping hints that all is not well. Descriptions like this one, “He had become absolutely motionless, and he kept his head down so that the light from the lamp beside him fell across the upper part of his face, leaving the chin and mouth in shadow.” suggests that there is a dark side to Patrick Maloney, that there is something that he is hiding.
The Signalman – Charles Dickens
In an interview, Dickens answered the following questions about the Signalman and his writing: -
Q. In the last paragraph of The Signalman, how does the fact that the visitor used the same words that haunted the signalman?
A. I wanted the Signalman to be a mysterious story about a man who is haunted by inexplicable premonitions, and the coincidence (which, you will notice, I explicitly point out in the final paragraph of this story) is there to add to the sense of the uncanny which pervades the whole.
Q. How does Charles Dickens build up the sense of mystery and suspense in The Signalman?
A. The Signalman tells of a railway worker whose job, in a deep cutting, is to attend to the signals. This man, isolated in the course of his work, sees visions – men crying ‘halloa! below there!’ and trying to warn him away from something.
I create mystery effectively and economically; the tale starts with the narrator calling down to the signalman with the words ‘halloa! below there!’, and the signalman’s startled response.
To begin with, the reader does not know why the signalman should respond so strangely; when he explains his agitation by relating the visions. This transfers the mystery onto the nature and explanation of these visions.
The reader suspends a supernatural agent, of course; but the fact that the tale is set on the railway – in the 1860s, a new and advanced technology – rather than in a mouldy old gothic castle or suchlike adds a sense of the unexpectedness, even the incongruity.
As the story nears its conclusion with the death of the signalman reported, the atmosphere of doom and a supernatural suspense is increased.
Q. When and where was Charles Dickens involved in a train crash and did this influence him when writing the short story The Signalman?
A. I was with Ellen Ternan and her mother on a train travelling from Folkestone to London on 9 June 1865, which was derailed while travelling at high speed at Staplehurst, Kent.
Rail repair men had misread the schedule and had not expected a train on the line for several hours when they lifted a section of track. As a result the driver was not warned, and ten people were killed, and many more injured, in the terrible crash.
Although I had always enjoyed rail travel up to then, I was badly shaken by the experience, and was nervous about travelling thereafter. Not so shaken, however, to prevent me clambering back into a derailed carriage to retrieve the manuscript of the latest instalment of Our Mutual Friend, which I was writing at the time!
You can be sure that the emotional horror of experiencing a train wreck was in my mind when I wrote The Signalman a year later.
