Pre 1914 Prose:Coursework “The black cottage”

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Pre 1914 Prose:

Coursework

“The black cottage” immediately gets you into the gloomy but adventurous mood in which the story is conceived, although you wouldn’t be able to tell what “The Signalman” had in store for you by its title.

Both of the stories authors Collins and Dickens don’t hesitate in making you feel uneasy about the place in which each of the stories is set and the characters in which the stories involve.

“The Black Cottage” is not so much a horror story but in a way a mild thriller, which is strange sometimes but an exiting story. The story gives you in many stages of the story that on the edge of your seat feeling as the main character manages to squeeze herself out of tight situations, a lot of the situation which are commonly used nowadays in horror movies, books and stories. The situation in the “Black Cottage” is a young girl who has been left alone in a cottage in the country with the nearest cottage being miles away.

“The signalman” in the other hand is not such a quickly paced chiller. A very clever story which is like no other, a strange and unsettling tale of a lonesome signalman who has committed himself to his job, a job as a signalman deep in a railway cutting away from the outside or “normal” world.

The main similarity about these two stories is that both of the stories are set out as if you knew something ominous, peculiar or supernatural was going to happen as the story unfolds.   

Dickens creates a very good structure for the story “The Signalman”, full of queries, puzzling moments and supernatural situations. All of these factors built up the story and prepared the reader for what was to come late in the story. Throughout the passage Dickens explores the setting and characters views in order to build up the suspense, which makes the tale so chilling, and weird. The suspense starts to build up from the very first sentence “Halloa! Below there” a unknown man calling the signalman from above his lonesome railway cutting. This short line proves to be very important as the story unfolds and is very important in building up the chilling feeling the story creates. “Halloa! Below there”  ? This is not something a normal person would say and is the very reason Dickens used it. Already from the first line of the story Dickens had managed to puzzle the reader. Another factor right from the start that built up tension was the fact that the two men who confront each other are left anonymous. Dickens hadn’t included a review or description of the two characters involved in the story which meant you didn’t know who they exactly where and what they where doing in that area. If Dickens had included a character description it is inevitable that there wouldn’t be so much tension in the story. Where these two real people or where they ghosts or spirits I found myself asking this was of course a ghost story so could these be spirits in which the story evolves around.

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From reading the first page or so Dickens misleads you into thinking that maybe the signalman himself was a spirit of some kind or a supernatural being. As the narrator explains from his own view there was something peculiar about the manner of the signalman as if something was on his mind or as if something was wrong. A bit in the first paragraph of the story which leads you to this conclusion is where the narrator explains “I stood on top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about, and looked down the line. There ...

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