In ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’, Roald Dahl opens the story by giving it a warm feeling, “warm and clean”, “curtains drawn”, “table lamps alight” are all quotes that help give it that relaxed, normal, comfy house feeling. It seems that nothing out of the ordinary can happen. A sense of loneliness is in the house, when the wife is waiting for her husband to come home from work, “empty chair opposite”.
‘The Signalman’ has an outdoor setting that comes across being dark and dingy. The setting is found at the entrance of a dark tunnel, “a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel”. It is said that there is “little sunlight” and that there is “barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air.” The setting is like another world “I had left the natural world”. The setting is described as “solitary and dismal”, and that it is cold “cold wind”, “chill”. It is in a “deep trench” at the railway lines.
The setting of ‘The Signalman’ is similar to that of ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ as each of them have a main indoor room that the story is set in (Signalman’s hut and the lounge in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’).
The setting of ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ is told through one main, descriptive sentence, “The room was warm and clean, the curtains drawn, the two table lamps alight – hers and one by the empty chair opposite.” This is the setting of the main room in the story, the lounge. It is a homely, warm description.
The contrasts between the two are that the lounge is “warm and clean” and that the setting in ‘The Signalman’ is damp, “clammy stone”.
‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ is set in a small town or village. This is shown when the police don’t take long to arrive, and that the grocer knows Mrs Maloney. This is a contrast between the two stories as ‘The Signalman’ is set outdoors in the country.
The themes of ‘The Signalman’ are similar to those of ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ in the sense that they both contain a death of some sort. The death in ‘The Signalman’ appears to be suicide, and in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ the death is a murder. Signalman also has a theme of the supernatural as ghosts are seen in the story, “the ghosts ring is a strange vibration”. There are also themes of self-doubt and madness as the Signalman is always alone, and no one believes what he has seen.
The themes in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ other than murder consist of denial (Mrs Maloney denies killing Mr Maloney as she goes to the grocers and doesn’t utter a word). Anger is another theme, along with revenge as she kills him with a leg of frozen lamb.
The Signalman isn’t either a believable or realistic character as there are certain parts of the story when it appears that he is going insane. He is described as “a dark sallow man, with a dark beard and rather heavy eyebrows”. “His attitude was one of such expectation and watchfulness” and he was clever but it appears that he is in the wrong job. “He had been well educated”, and “educated above that station” are both quotes that show that he was clever. “a student of natural philosophy, and had attended lectures; but he had run wild, misused his opportunities, gone down, and never risen again.” This shows that he had misused his education as he is clever, but doesn’t have to use his brain too much.
The Signalman appears to be insane; he thinks that he has heard his bell ring, but it hasn’t rang.
“Did it ring your bell yesterday evening when I was here, and when you went to the door?”
“Twice.”
“It did not ring at these times.”
The strange vibration of the bell causing the Signalman to go mad because he thought that a disaster was going to happen each time it rung, is put in to show that he might be going insane.
In ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’, Mary Maloney is a realistic character. She appears to be an average, everyday housewife “waiting for her husband to come home from work.” She is pregnant and well educated. She shows that she is clever as she gets the police to eat the evidence (the lamb). She is angry “at that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him and without any pause she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head.” She is also believable because of the way she acts about the incident; the way she acts at the grocers and how she gets shocked when she gets home and sees him lying there, on the floor.
‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ is wrote by an omniscient writer, meaning that they know everything that goes on around them and only narrate. They have no need to talk about themselves, whereas if Mrs Maloney had wrote it, it would be in first person and she probably wouldn’t have said that she had killed Mr Maloney.
Direct speech is used in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’. I think that it is used so that we know about the conversation that takes place at the beginning of the story, also so that we know about the depth of the story. More information is found in third person, so it is most useful to this story. It is used to describe character’s actions and you don’t get to know the mind of the person that is telling the story.
Personification is used in ‘The Signalman’, “so steeped in the glow of an angry sunset”, here, Dickens gives the sunset a human emotion.
It is written in first person, with the effect of this being that we don’t know whether the narrator is reliable or not. Because it is wrote in this format, we do not know as much about the characters in it as in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’.
Direct speech is used in ‘The Signalman’. From this we learn about the narrator, and it also makes it more believable.
In ‘The Signalman’ you get to find out bit by bit what’s going on, building suspense in short sentences. The more we find out about the ghost, the more the suspense builds. Suspense starts to build up when he narrator talks about the tunnel. Dickens uses ghost/ horror words, which build up the suspense by making it scarier, and making you begin to wonder what’s going to happen.
At the beginning of the story, when the narrator shouts “Halloa! Below there!” to the Signalman, the Signalman looks down the line, in a sense of confusion, rather than looking above him to where the voice was actually coming from. He does this because he usually sees visions of men crying “Halloa! Below there!” and so responded strangely to the narrator.
In ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ suspense is developed when Mary Maloney is waiting for her husband, but increases when the conversation begins. 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 still be 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.
There are similarities in the plots of both of the stories; death, and there is one main character in each story, also being the one that you know the most about (Mrs Maloney and the Signalman). Neither Mrs Maloney or the Signalman is mentally stable as Mary Maloney giggles at the end, and the Signalman sees ghosts. The narrator leaves it up to you in both stories to decide things. Eg. Did the Signalman commit suicide? Why did Mary Maloney kill him? Both stories are enclosed in a small area, and both Mary Maloney and the Signalman are intelligent.
The differences between the two are that; there is a supernatural theme in ‘The Signalman’, and there is a murder in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ whereas there is a suicide in ‘The Signalman’. The death in ‘The Signalman’ is built up to, whereas it is unexpected in ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’.
You may expect that Mr Maloney kills Mrs Maloney because he is very quiet and content at the beginning of the story and Mrs Maloney appears to be a normal, peaceful housewife. The plot is different in both stories and the setting is different.
There is a twist in both stories; in ‘The Signalman’ the fact that he sees the premonition of his own death. Also that the policemen eat the murder weapon. In ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ there is the fact that we do not expect the normal housewife to turn out to be a killer.
In ‘The Signalman’ we do not expect it to be the Signalman’s death. It is expected that the Signalman would be able to prevent, or predict someone else’s death and not his own. It starts out as a normal story, with what seems to be an everyday confusion. What the Signalman sees is exactly what happens; the exact actions and words are the same. “The left arm is across the face, and the right arm is waved, - violently waved.” – is the vision, and “I put this arm before my eyes not to see, and I waved this arm to the last; but it was no use.” – is what the train driver tells the police that happened.
Another premonition was that of “Look out! Look out! And then again: Halloa! Below there! Look out!” and the actual incident – “I said, Below there! Look out! Look out! For God’s sake clear the way!”
In ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’ it wasn’t expected that there would be a female murderess, as she is a normal housewife, also – it wasn’t expected that the murder would be at the beginning. I expected that Mrs Maloney would be murdered, as she appears so innocent.
I think that Charles Dickens was trying to show a different perspective on life. In Charles’ life, he had a short time, as a child where he was living in the slums and he involves this in his story. He is trying to show the rich what happens to the poor.
Roald Dahl wrote for entertainment. He shows in his story what a fine line there is between love and hate. He uses stereotypes to try and prove things wrong. People would assume that the man kills the women that the man goes to work while the wife sits at home. He shows that women are just as capable of killing their husbands as of husbands killing their wives.
