The Signalman has an unsuspected ending. Explore the way in which the writer builds up tension in the course of the story so that the reader is surmised to see how the story ends.

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The Signalman has an unsuspected ending. Explore the way in which the writer builds up tension in the course of the story so that the reader is surmised to see how the story ends.

“The Signalman” is a spooky, sardonic and peculiar story with twists and an ending that will shock and surprise you .The sense of death throughout the story adds a poky sense to make feel scared and traumatised.

        The suspense is built tremendously using an extensive range of character descriptions and vocabulary. This is what the author, Charles Dickens special quality is and he does this in many of his other novels.

        In “The Signalman” Dickens makes links to many other gothic fiction novels such as “Dracula” by Bram Stoker and Mary Shelly’s “Frankenstein”. “The Signalman” builds tension just like “Dracula” using dark dingy atmospheric effects.

        Darkness is one of the main aspects of gothic fiction used in “The Signalman” for example in “Dracula” “the stairs were dark, being lit only by loopholes”. Darkness adds a mysterious scary effect.

        Another aspect of gothic fiction used in “The Signalman”, probably one of the most important aspects in this case, is supernatural forces. For example in the bone-crunching disturbing novel “The Haunted Hotel” the quote “The flesh of the face was gone. The shrivelled skin was darkened in hue, like the skin of an Egyptian mummy”. This quote shows supernatural forces present when describing an apparition. When supernatural forces are present you can believe the unbelievable in the story.                

        In “Jane Eyre” by Charlotte Brontë Jane is guarding a horrifically injured man close to a room that houses his attacker. In this senses are used to add mood again this is a common gothic fiction skill used also in “The Signalman”. In Jane Eyre a quote that shows this is “A sharp creak, a momentary renewal of snarling canine noise, and a deep human groan”, the use of senses with personification giving inanimate objects human qualities in “Jane Eyre” it shows how much pain the man is in by comparing him to a “canine”.

        In Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” the young hero Jonathan Harker is suspicious of the count and single handed he goes in search of the counts secret. The theme of isolation and loneliness is used here to make it effectively think that it is you alone are in the story. For example when Jonathan Harker is recalling looking around for the Counts secret in the Counts house, “I went, but saw nothing except fragments of old coffins and piles of dust”

        Getting on to “The Signalman” and how the opening two paragraphs, immediately in this opening tension starts to build. The first sentence “Halloa below there!” is speech however the reader has no idea who is saying what. This already is supposed to make you feel a sense of mysterious urgency as we have no idea what is going on.

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        Also when the narrator calls down to the signalman he does not look up at him he looks at the train line, although the reader does not know why he looked there it seems intensely strange. The reason he looks at the train line is that he thinks that a ghost from the rail is talking to him. We know this because of the quote “instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head he turned himself about and looked down at the line”. This makes the signalman’s character eerie ...

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