Write an essay showing how elements of mystery are used in Signalman, Monkeys Paw and Napoleon and the Spectre

Authors Avatar

Write an essay showing how elements of mystery are used in ‘Signalman, Monkeys Paw and Napoleon and the Spectre’

‘The Monkey’s Paw’, ‘The Signal Man’ and the ‘Napoleon and the Spectre’ use elements and genres of mysteries. In all three stories you witness a sense of loneliness and the unknown from their settings, to their characters, to the way in which they deal with the supernatural.

‘The Monkey’s Paw’ is set in a deserted place where no one is around. Words used in the story like “Blinds were drawn”, “Fire”, “Grimly”, foreshadows of trouble to come.  is a technique in which the writer hints at the events to come. Sometimes, authors depict events early in a story that are really microcosms of the plot that is soon to unfold. It is set at “night when it is cold and wet”, which is a fine setting for mystery. WW Jacobs uses archaic words throughout and builds up tension throughout the story.

 

Charles Dickens’s description of the setting in ‘The Signalman’ is extremely lonely and isolated. ‘His figure was foreshortened and shadowed, down in the deep trench. The ‘Signalman’s’ location is ‘extremely deep’ and ‘unusually precipitous’. On his way down to reach the signalman, he comes across a ‘dripping wet wall of jagged stone’ this ‘excluded the view but a strip of sky’.

The dungeon ends with a ‘red light’ which signals danger to the reader, also at the tunnel there is a rough ‘depressing and forbidden air’ which gave it that edge. ‘So little sunlight’ got through so the tunnel had a very ‘earthy and deadly smell to it’ also it was very ‘gloomy’. The tunnel also has a very ‘cold wind rushing through it’, Charles Dickens goes on to say that its ‘as if I had left the natural world’ suggesting to the reader that this world that he is about to enter is full of suspicion and the unknown.

Join now!

The narrator in the 'Signalman' is a man of rationality who scientifically analyses the railroad employee like a doctor would a patient. He scrutinises the Signalman in a cold analytical way, which shows how he tries to dismiss these inexplicable stories with logical reasons. "Originating in disease of the delicate nerves that...

In the ‘Monkey’s Paw’ introduces four main characters are a family called the Whites and Sergeant-Major Morris. Short stories do not give a length description on characters but this adds suspense to the air and leaves the reader to make assumptions. The Sergeant-Major Morris likes to be ...

This is a preview of the whole essay