As The Red Room develops, so does the tension. He leaves the old people and makes his way to the red room alone. The journey builds up the suspense of what is going to happen; it says ‘the echoes ran up and down the spiral staircase, and a shadow came sweeping up after me’ and ‘I stood ridged for half a minute perhaps.’ The old people’s warnings have stumped out his arrogance and he is left nervous and fearful of what may happen to him. It gives more clues when we discover what had happened to the narrator’s predecessor who mysteriously died in this room, this gives us a little more knowledge of the room without giving it all away. We assume that something similar to the previous deaths will happen to our narrator so we keep reading, guessing his fate. The story climaxes when the man begins to panic as all his candles start going out and he is no longer in control of the room, the shadows and the lights play tricks on him until he makes a desperate attempt to leave the room, but is knocked out before he makes it. It uses short sentences for effect and when he falls it leaves the reader wanting to find out what has caused it. There is lots of use of personification that makes it seem like the room is alive and acting against him, so we want to know if there is some kind of force tormenting him.
There is a more conventional ghost in The Signalman, but it is just as mysterious. The signalman tells the narrator of the figure he sees by the track which is always followed by death on the line. The story is revealed slowly so as to keep the tension high. The way the signalman is afraid makes the narrator more uneasy, for instance it says ‘He pulled out his handkerchief, and wiped the drops from his heated forehead’. When he tells us that he has been seeing the figure all week, we suddenly are expecting another accident, but we don’t know when. The signalman knows an accident is coming but there is nothing he can do about it, so his frustration increases the tension ‘It was the mental torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life’. We are now guessing what will happen next – who will be the one to die? The use of the nameless narrator makes the story more interesting rather than telling it from the signalman’s point of view which would not let the story be discovered slowly. There is a similarity between the narrators of both stories as they are simply used as observers and they do not seem to have names, histories or particular personalities. I think the writers did this because it keeps the stories short and simple and focused only on the supernatural side of the tales.
Language is another important factor in gothic fiction as it helps create atmosphere and tension. In The Red Room there is a lot of personification of the shadows, they are described as being almost alive and almost having free will. For instance it says ‘the shadows seemed to take another step towards me’ and ‘the black shadow sprang back to it’s place there’ as if they were out to get him. It also shows the reader how afraid the narrator is instead of telling them, ‘my hands trembled so much’ and ‘speaking with a half-hysterical facetiousness’ which is a more effective way of getting a point across instead of saying ‘I was scared’. This technique is also used in The Signalman when it says ‘a disagreeable shudder crept over me’. The language used when the signalman is telling his tale makes the atmosphere more tense as I think it makes it sound like there is some kind of external presence lingering over them as more of the story gets revealed, ‘the slow touch of a frozen finger tracing out my spine’ and ‘the winds and the wires took up the story with a long lamenting wail’. This is similar to personification in The Red Room, but it is using the fear as something that has come to life.
Both stories keep the tension going right until the end and both leave many unanswered questions. In The Red Room the narrator comes to the conclusion that the room is haunted by fear and imagination, but the last line leaves the ending open, ‘and there will be - so long as this house of sin endures’. This leaves us with questions about the possibility of the room being cursed, and the power of human imagination. Similar questions about imagination are left with the ending of The Signalman, the final accident occurs and it is the signalman who was killed, but was the ghost real? We realise the ghost was warning him of his own death, but we don’t know why. Both these stories invite the reader to make up their own explanations.
All the features in these stories are archetypal of gothic fiction – the setting, characters, themes and suspense building. Tension is created in the beginning with long, evocative descriptions, is maintained with clues and the slow building of plot and is kept right until after the closing sentences with unanswered questions. The two stories are similar in style and much of the language is comparable. However, the mystery of the red room is witnessed first hand by the narrator, but in The Signalman all the mystery is revealed via another character and the ghost itself is never seen, which makes it all the more mystifying. In my opinion, the stories worked very well at setting the scene and pacing the tension, but I think both the endings were too vague. While the unanswered questions might invite the reader to consider the story further, I felt they should have given a little more explanation to get you thinking.
