A Detailed Look at 'The Signal-Man' (A* work)

The Signalman

The repetition of ‘Halloa! Below there!’ draws the reader’s attention to these particular words and emphasises them to ensure that the readers remember them later on when the signalman reveals them to be the exact words of the ghost haunting him.

At the sound of the narrator’s voice, the man looks down the railway line instead of upwards where the narrator is (which would have been an obvious place to look). The narrator finds his manner of doing so ‘remarkable’ and finds himself being attracted by curiosity to him.

There are several connotations and descriptive words used to reflect the feeling of a train passing. The ‘vibration in the earth’ refers to the quake in the ground the train makes as it passes, the ‘violent pulsation’ and ‘oncoming rush’ of the air describes the strong wind the train’s speed creates and the way it is going so fast that it is practically sucking up air: ‘it had force to draw me down’. These are all descriptions that match the feelings one experiences when a train, especially one going very fast, passes by.

A rather dark, depressing mood is created, reflecting an idea of poverty and isolation. The signalman is described with gloomy, rather negative adjectives ‘dark, sallow’ with ‘heavy eyebrows’. The word ‘heavy’ gives a sense of weariness and untidiness, implying the man looks un-groomed, scruffy and tired. The metaphor ‘dungeon’ emphasises the idea of his post being ‘solitary’ and ‘dismal’ and gives out the notion it is a prison for him. He has no escape from his underprivileged, squalid life in his small hut. The ‘gloomy, barbarous, depressing and forbidding’ air and ‘earthy deadly smell’ paint an unpleasant picture of a foul-smelling, unattractive and unfriendly place.

Their suspicion of each other is resolved when the narrator swears he was never at the mouth of the tunnel (where the signalman saw the ghost). This causes the signalman to relax and ‘his manner clears’ when he realizes the narrator isn’t the ghost he saw.

The signalman reveals he had a privileged education ‘above (…) any great railway staff’ and had been a ‘student of natural philosophy and attended lectures’. I know it was a privileged education because he studied natural philosophy, which was at the time a distinguished, luxurious subject and a privilege to be studying in those days.This suggests he was from a rich, fortunate background.

The signalman seems to become terrified twice, at random intervals, his face turning ‘a fallen colour’ and looking at the bell as if it had rung despite the fact it hadn’t. At these two times, he goes to open the door of the hut and looks at the red light where he first mistook the narrator to be next to. Then he returns to the fire with the ‘inexplicable air’ that the narrator previously saw him looking at him with.

The signalman’s ‘peculiar’ tone shows his attitude is unusual and out-of-the-ordinary (like most events/characters in ghost-stories), hinting that something is wrong. His ‘low voice’ gives off an ominous, eerie impression; he is speaking quietly out of fear or desire to not be heard (by the ghost most likely). The repetition of his eerie warning ‘don’t call out!’ and the use of an exclamation mark at the end of each warning emphasises his urge and creates a worrying sense of danger and hostility. The reader is chilled and is faced with suspense: what will happen if the narrator calls out?

The eerie setting, the signalman’s strange, unusual attitude of ‘such expectation and watchfulness’, the narrator’s feeling that there was ‘something in the man that daunted him’ and the signalman’s apparent fear of the narrator despite him being normal all indicate there is something strange going on in the story and hint at a supernatural event.

The first premonition the signalman experienced was at night. The ghost was at the red light at the mouth of the tunnel, shouted ominous warnings and then disappeared when the signalman tried to touch him. Not long after this, there was an accident on the railway and the bodies of the people who had been killed or wounded were brought to the exact same spot where the ghost had appeared earlier. The second premonition was in the morning. The ghost was in the same position next to the red light. It was silent and seemed to be mourning. The same day, another accident happened and a woman died in the train. The third event was the ghost appearing again, shouting other warnings in an ‘agonised manner’ and ringing the little bell. The event after this final apparition is not yet known by the signalman.

It is revealed that the ghost rings the bell in a particular ‘strange vibration’ which doesn’t move the bell but makes it that the signalman can still hear it. That is why the signalman kept getting up to check the bell and the red light and looked distressed.

He cannot telegraph Danger to the railway operators because he cannot justify it and would get into trouble for raising alarm with no reliable reason to do so. He would most likely get dismissed from his post.

The narrator decides to seek advice from ‘the wisest medical practitioner’, a psychologist basically. He thinks the signalman might be suffering from hallucinations or poor mental health.

The signalman has been run over and killed by the train. He had been standing in the middle of the train tracks and despite the train driver yelling warnings at him, he did not move and was killed.

The train driver was shouting the exact same warnings at the ghost had been when he was trying to get the signalman to move off the railway: ‘Bellow there! Look out! For God’s sake, clear the way!’ He was also in the same position as the ghost had been in its first apparition with one arm across the eyes.

The narrator ‘starts’ when the train driver repeats the warnings he shouted which shows he is visibly shocked and upset. He notes the significance of the similarity between the driver's actions and the actions of the ghost described earlier by the signalman, which shows he has realized the link and most likely is very taken-aback and alarmed at this discovery.

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