With detailed reference to The Signalman by Charles Dickens and The Red Room show how the writers create an air of mystery.by H. G. Wells, compare the ways in which the two writers sustain/convey an air of mystery and surprise in the two short stories.

Authors Avatar

The two short stories are very similar in terms of the period in history in which they were written, as well as both being of a similar style of story and genre. But both writers convey an air of mystery and surprise in the two short stories slightly different in some areas, with one of the two sometimes having the greater effect.

In The Red Room, by H. G. Wells, the story begins with the three words of the title at the top of the page. The capitalization of ‘the’ not only signifies the title of the story, but also the importance of the Red Room in the story to come. Also, the colour red is often associated with motifs of either love and comfort, or blood and death/murder. In the sense of the colour being used to mean the latter, the prominence of the word throughout the story is significant in creating an air of mystery and surprise for the reader. The story also begins with dialogue which can be separated into different literary techniques used clever in a short space to convey a sense of immediacy. The use of personal pronouns, ‘I’ and ‘you’, create this image of closeness between the reader and the narrator, with the accompanying verb ‘assure’ creating a sense of surety. The whole passage is also written in the first person, and contains a lot more dialogue than The Signalman in the form of direct speech. First person always creates a sense of immediacy, and this in turn can create a sense of mystery.

Anonymity conveys an air of surprise and mystery from when it first used at the beginning of the passage, with each of the characters not being referred to with a given name. ‘The man with the withered arm’, ‘the man with the shade’, and other descriptions portray a sense that the elderly people are worn and the signs of old age can be seen in their disabilities. Age is another motif used by Wells to help the reader feel a sense of mystery, where the old and the young are reversed frequently towards the end of the story, and history is referred to in the red room itself. The death of a young duke in the past, and other deaths which have happened in the Castle, provide the reader with exposition to create an air of surprise as to what has happened, and mystery as to what might happen to him. Age is also referred to in speech, where he reveals that he is quite young, at ‘eight-and-twenty-years’. He also references to having drunken from an ‘empty glass’, which symbolises the emptiness found within the opening room with the elderly, and leaving them behind to their own fate when he ‘shut them in and walked down the chilly, echoing passage.’ It is in this line where the narrator chooses to be alone rather than stay in the comfort of the elderly people, which is an act of bravery and conveys surprise in his decision for the reader. Repetition used by the anonymous also replicates a slight mantra where the old people say phrases continuously to make the man rest for the night with them instead of alone. ‘This night of all nights?’ is a phrase used by the old woman, and the phrasing of the sentence changes from exclamation to show surprise, to a query to emphasise the mystery of the room and the setting being at night time. The narrator later describes the older anonymous people belonging to ‘another age, an older age’, implying that he believes them to be ghosts themselves, or not all they seem to be in truth, which creates a sense of mystery in the form of further anonymity. Dickens also uses anonymity at a glance in The Signalman, in ‘the nameless horror’ which had not been described before to the narrator, much like the fear in The Red Room being unknown to the elderly people.

Join now!

The supernatural was also being used by Wells to create an ongoing sense of surprise and mystery, more so in surprise. When introducing the older residents of the Castle, Wells uses adjectives which change the atmosphere to a darker state than was previously, by using ‘spiritual’ and ‘droning’. Commas also used throughout the story reflect the flowing of the dead about a room, either fast paced to scare a person, or slowly to comfort and help. In the path which he takes to embark on the Red Room, the narrator describes his pathway as being partly a spiral staircase. Spiral ...

This is a preview of the whole essay