The significance of the statue of Ganymede is that this specific myth could be called threatening and ominous, the boy Ganymede was taken with no forewarning, by force therefore we can compare Ganymede’s powerlessness to the powerlessness of the narrator before fear and the unknown, the significance of the eagle is to represent the eagle that is said to have taken Ganymede to Mount Olympus, furthermore the eagle casts an incredibly creepy shadow and this increase the fear and suspension.
The whole house, and particularly the red room, is dark, cast in shadows. This darkness threatens the narrator; it makes him imagine things that aren’t actually there. There are the shadows, which have "that indefinable quality of a presence, that odd suggestion of a lurking, living thing" (page 46). The darkness that inspires fear and the "Fear" itself are closely connected, meaning that the narrator is so terrified by the darkness that he becomes very scared and is imbued with fear. Suitably, the story ends in the daytime, when the darkness is gone and the narrator can come back to his sanity. In the light of day, he can realize what he was actually fighting in the room.
The narrator himself doesn’t believe in the supernatural at the start, and is certain that his rationale and good sense will conquer whatever illogical fears he might have. However, his fear turns out to be much stronger than he initially thought; it can't be controlled by his mental power. As the story progresses, the narrator’s fear gets stronger until it completely overwhelms his self-control and he ends up going completely mad. We have been following the story as if we have been standing next to the narrator, at first we are impressed by his confident bravado but now we can see that he is actually pusillanimous. The people at the beginning help boost the narrator’s self-belief; he thinks that these people are just ‘old pensioners’ (page 45) who are there to be humoured not taken seriously.
The old people in the room with the fire are disfigured, there is a lady with a ‘bent carriage’ and a man with a ‘withered arm’ (page 44) There is also a ‘queer old mirror’. This mirror distorts the young mans figure, the mirror is what helps the man decide to just humour the old people. This mirror and these weird people sow seeds of uncertainty in to the narrators mind; it makes the reader feel repulsed and therefore we can already feel the fear and uncertainty of the young man.
The sense of foreboding increases when another ghastly old man suddenly appears. This "man with the shade" (page 43) enters the room and starts coughing up a storm. In the midst of a tense silence, the narrator asks to be shown to the haunted red room. The man with the withered arm tells him to take the ‘candle on the slab outside the door’ (page 44). The complete opposite of the gothic genre is light; by taking the candle the young man is “fighting” the darkness and his doubts.
The old man tells the narrator that if he wants to go to "the red room" on "this night of all nights" (Page 43, 44), he must go alone. This incessant repeating helps to increase the fear and aggravation we feel. WE don’t know what is wrong with this night, we never actually find out, but by repeating this sentence the foreboding, of what will happen later in the story, is built up.
At the end of the story the young man sees that these old gruesome people are actually just old people, he now recognizes that they are not quite so creepy or abnormal as they had appeared the night before, ‘I rolled my eyes into the corner, and saw the old woman, no longer abstracted, pouring out some drops of medicine from a little blue phial into a glass’. (49) The narrator sees the old woman as "no longer abstracted." Now that its day and the dreadful experience are behind him, he realises that he was frightened of harmless old people. It helps that she’s taking care of him. In any case, this remark makes us wonder how much of what he described earlier was "accurate," and how much was created by his state of mind.
Our Narrator is very young compared with the ghoulish older people who preside in Lorraine Castle. According to the text he is only ‘eight and twenty years’ (page 43). He is completely confident that nothing will happen to him. He doesn’t believe in ghosts because he hasn’t ever seen one. He mocks the old people for their belief in dark and spooky beings.
‘I can assure you, said I, that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me.’ (page 43) In the story’s opening line, the narrator boasts that he’s not easily frightened. He says this as he is standing up. He’s either a genuinely confident soul, or he is just a poser. This opening line turns out to be incredibly ironic because as it turns out, it doesn’t take anything "tangible" to frighten him at all.
Here it was, thought I, that my predecessor was found, and the memory of that story gave me a sudden twinge of apprehension. (page 45)After going through the long corridor where tension mounts, he reaches the door of the red room and here the narrator admits to experiencing another pang of fear here, again before he enters the red room. This time what inspires his fear is not something he sees, but an association he has with the red room: it’s where someone died, and there’s a legend around it. There is some significance in the Red Room as in the red of blood which signifies the death of the young countess who died of fright because of her husband’s jokes and the death of the earl who spent a night in the room.
The man goes in to the room and locks the door behind him, this gives a hint that the man is starting to believe in the supernatural, he locked the door behind him and lay his ‘revolver ready to hand’ (page 46) he is scared and feels that he needs security near him. He created a sort of barricade in front of him.
All goes fine until after midnight, when the candle in the alcove suddenly goes out. As the man gets up to go relight the candle with his matches, two of the candles behind him also go dark. Now he gets scared and has absolutely no idea what was happening. A struggle then starts as the narrator runs from candle to candle trying to keep the room alight as they mysteriously go out. Eventually, he trips and falls near the table and loses his candle, he finds himself in a room that is totally dark except for the dim glow of the fireplace. But just as he picks up a candle and approaches the fire to light it, the fire is mysteriously extinguished.
By this time, the narrator has lost any sense of calm he had remaining, and makes a run for the door. However, it's dark and he can’t see well, so he trips over the bed. He then gets "battered" (Page 46) by various things in the dark, though it’s unclear whether he’s running into things, or something is actually battering him. He is eventually knocked unconscious by a blow to the forehead.
The story now switches to the daytime and the three old people are standing around him. They had bandaged him and looked after him; the woman was giving him medicine. He had thought that these people were freaky the night before but now he can see that they are just old pensioners. The narrator is suffering from concussion and has to be told what had happened the night before, only then can he tell the old people what it was that ‘fought and attacked’ him in the room the night before.
Here we have the narrator’s dramatic announcement that Fear is what haunts the red room ‘in all its nakedness - Fear‘(page 49). Whereas before he was dismissive of fear, now he is terrified of it. He has had a firsthand experience of the power of fear. Fear has the power to make a person lose control of himself and all he believes in. It doesn’t respond to reason. It’s a real invisible enemy it does ‘not have light nor sound’ (page 49), just like a ghost would be. The narrator even goes so far as to identify fear as an enemy of mankind.
"There is Fear in that room of hers – black Fear, and there will be – so long as this house of sin endures" (Page 50). The man with the shade gets the last word. He just repeats what the narrator has said, only more eloquently and with greater finality. Furthermore, he certainly does this in a deep and terrifying voice to add emphasis to the importance of what he has to say.
