30 pages • 1 hour read
Charles DickensThe Signal-Man
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1866A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Literary Devices
Point of View
Dickens authors the story from the narrator’s first-person point of view, so the narrator’s perspective mediates between the signal man and the reader. The narrator seems reliable, inspiring trust in the signal man through his attentive listening, and inviting trust in the reader. Moreover, he consciously attempts to approach the ghost without making immediate judgments, setting aside all “questions of reality and unreality” so that he can better understand and help the signal man (320), even though he is skeptical of the ghost as a supernatural entity.
The narrator “reads” his world carefully, providing a conscientious lens through which to approach the signal man and the purported ghosts. That even this lens proves insufficient to decode the story’s mystery underscores Dickens’s depiction of The Supernatural and the Limits of Human Understanding. Ultimately, the narrator’s first-person point of view on the signal man replicates the signal man’s position in relation to the ghost: Both are attempting to understand their subject of interest without being able to inhabit or fully know that subject.
Setting
The story takes place over several nights in mid-19th-century England. The specific physical setting is almost entirely restricted to the railway cutting, including the zigzag path, the signal man’s office or “box,” the railway tunnel, and the tracks. Though the signal man leaves daily, the setting is limited to this space in which he works and in which the narrator is interested.
The rock walls that surround the signal man are “jagged” and “dripping-wet,” and the cutting is “as solitary and dismal a place as ever [the narrator] saw” (313). Little sunlight seeps into the space, which smells “earthy” and “dead.” The “chill” wind that rushes through the tunnel even makes the narrator feel as if he has “left the natural world” (313). These descriptions echo the liminal nature of the story’s setting: The railway tunnel and the signal man’s box are in-between places in their function and purpose, but they also exist in a space between the natural and supernatural, and between life and death. The setting thus amplifies the story’s ambiguity, with its more ominous associations foreshadowing the story’s conclusion.
Irony
Irony is an expression or action that is the opposite of what is expected or intended; the tension in the difference between the two gives irony its meaning. The thread of irony that runs throughout this story is that the signal man cannot signal, nor can he interpret them. The very action for which he is “named” is precisely the action that he feels he can no longer successfully perform. His designation as “the signal man,” then, ironically “signals” that he is existentially doomed long before he is actually killed. If the signal man is not what the story tells readers he “is,” then it is almost as if he were himself a “ghost” of this supposed self.
The gothic context of the story insists on never answering the question of what the signal man “is,” in much the same way that no one ever determines what the supposed ghost “is.” Irony facilitates a particularly gothic way of “understanding” the signal man’s trouble: In the darkness and confusion of his inability to signal—his helplessness to enact The Burden of Responsibility that gives his life purpose—lies ironic meaning.
Ambiguity
While irony finds meaning in the opposite direction of where it is expected (in the signal man not being a signal man), ambiguity locates meaning in the very absence of meaning: mystery. The story focuses on what cannot be read fully (the ghost’s signal) and what cannot be told fully (the signal man’s torment). The narrator’s attempts to understand the signal man and his death mediate the incompleteness of these readings and tellings, but the narrator cannot solve the final mystery of what killed the signal man. In the narrator’s conclusion, he can only point to the “curious” “coincidence” of the similarity between the ghost’s warnings and gestures and those of Tom (in addition to the words the narrator’s mind supplied on seeing Tom’s reenactment).
The story involves several mysteries, none of which are solved. The reader cannot know, first, whether the signal man is tormented by the supernatural (an actual ghost) or the psychological (hallucinations as a result of stress). The causes of the signal man’s death are likewise unclear—i.e., whether it was a suicide, a moment of distraction, “murder” on the part of the ghost, etc. The story ends with mystery; like the signal man, the reader cannot decipher what remains inscrutable.
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