Prepare and Contrast 'The Signalman' and 'The Red Room'. In your writing you should consider the following: Narrators, Settings, Plot and Language

Charles Dickens narrator is an informal, well educated, high class citizen who is up to date with technology and is well informed of its presence in modern day life he seems however to be wrapped up in technology as he is a traveller who moves from place to place, to try to improve his knowledge. The language he uses to narrate is polished and complex, ‘There was something remarkable in his manner of doing so’. The difference between the narrators is extremely large, the narrator in ‘The Red Room’ is young, educated pompous and upper class. He seems unsure of everything around him; he denies all unnatural happenings and passes them off as an event of chance. He will not admit even by the end of the novel that he was wrong and that the happenings in ‘The Red Room’ were abnormal in any form. The biggest difference between the two narrators is the way in which they seem aware of the happenings around them, the narrator from ‘The Red Room’ is totally un-aware of the happenings in his surroundings and anything he does notice he passes off as a happening of chance or indeed thinks nothing of it. The narrator in ‘The Signalman’ is well informed and tries to find a reason through science; he tries to explain the unexplainable.

‘The Signalman’ is set in a misty valley perhaps in rural Britain in a Signalman’s box. The use of the similes and metaphors creates an image in our minds, ‘a rough descending zigzag path notched out’. Perhaps more stereotypically of a gothic novel ‘The Red Room’ is set in a large mansion which strange elderly people inhabit, ‘the man with the withered arm’?

The Plot in both novels are somewhat strange in essence however ‘The Signalman’ makes more sense and has an eerie lingering cloud about it. The start of the play the traveller crosses a railway bridge to see below him a Signalman’s box, intrigued by this he decides to descend to see the signalman and talk to him. This is where we learn of his interest with technology and most of all his openness with the modern world. As the story continues on the traveller gets to know the signalman and the signalman tells the traveller of a déjà vu that he has had, of a man calling out to him from the bridge and then from inside the tunnel below the bridge.  He tells him of a strange happening with a ‘Supernatural’ being who has perhaps been killed by a train or has resided in the signal box and died of a natural cause.