Red Room + The Signalman
...nclusion. The narrator later admits to being unsettled by his surroundings and the people surrounding him, but endeavours to dismiss his fear and claim rational thought. ‘But with an effort I sent such thoughts to the right about.’ A sense of unease and fear is also created when the narrator says: ‘I must confess that the oddness of these three old pensioners in whose charge Her ladyship had left the castle’ This makes the reader uneasy by the fact that vital information is withheld from us rather that being presented from the start, creating suspense and fear. This makes the experience of reading disconcerting and thus the imbalance of the narrator is mirrored by the reader’s uncertainty, which is a very unsettling technique. Wells builds the suspense to form a climactic approach to the room. This is seen when he says ‘I shut them in and walked down the chilly, echoing passage.’ This is effective as it immediately sets the gothic horror of the place and the reader catches the eerie atmosphere instantaneously. As the narrator walks down the corridor he describes his surroundings as ‘The long, draughty subterranean passage was chilly and dusty, and my candle flared and made the shadows cower and quiver.’ This instantly gives the intention of gothic significance as his description immediately stresses the hellish, ‘subterranean’ and deathly essence of his environment. When the narrator finally finds the Red Room, his first instinct was, ‘I entered, closed the door behind me at once…surveying the scene of my vigil, the great red room of Lorraine Castle, in which the young duke had died’ This is another effective use of structure to build up tension and therefore fear is the drip-feeding of information throughout both stories. This delaying of important information builds up the curiosity of the reader but can also unsettle him. He goes on to relate that: ‘The shadow in the alcove at the end in particular had that indefinable quality Of a presence, that odd suggestion of a lurking, living thing, that comes So easily in solitude.’ This shows us that the narrator himself is having a moral conflict and is trying to calm down but the shadow is still present. We see that he is using scientific pragmatism to answer the battle that he is having within and is always attempting to find a solution to the uncanny occurrences in ‘The Red Room.’ He then says ‘My mind however, was perfectly clear.’ From this we can see that he is in denial and that his pompous and arrogant attitude has returned as his mind dismissed the fact of the supernatural. This is uneasy as we can sense his growing hysteria. We also see the he is now in a process of doublethink and he is deluding himself. As well as this we see that he is overcompensating. As the story goes on we see that the narrator begins to speak to himself, which is an early sign of his mind accepting the fact of something else with him or growing insanity. Furthermore, he then attempts to make a joke: ‘I could warn him not to trip over them.’ The technique here is to try and get through his experience in the red room, but as this is so forced it is a clear indication of his lack of equilibrium. The real test of character for the narrator however comes where he enters “the Red Room”: “I entered, closed the door behind me at once, turned the key I found in the lock within…” The fact that he locks the door tells us one of two possible things. Firstly, that the narrator is so confident that he wishes to lock himself with the supernatural within the room. In this case, the characterisation and over-confidence in the narrator would build up tension by implanting a belief in the reader’s mind that his arrogance will be his downfall. The second possible reason is that fear is starting to seize him and he wishes to lock out anything from coming inside the room with him. Tension would also be built up in this scenario, as his irrationality would increase the tension for the reader. This is a slightly vague action made by Wells to force the reader into making decisions which gets them more involved in the story. However whichever way the reader deciphers this action, tension is added to the story, as is a sense of fear for the fate of the narrator. He is searching for reasons for the things he feels. “’Odd!’ I said. ‘Did I do that myself in a flash of absentmindedness?” Here we see that he is questioning his own ability and doubts himself as he has now reasoning why the candle went out. As we see that his sceptical character is forever changing and that he doubts himself, it makes us think if we should believe what he is saying and if he is being honest here or if he is a trustworthy narrator, this creates unease, as the reader is unsure about what is occurring in the narrator’s mind and what is in his environment. We also have to take into account the fact that this is written in his own point of view and he might be exaggerating slightly or perhaps the experience just made him panic and make the experience worse than it was and it is this very lack of certainty that is highly unsettling for the reader. ‘But then in a volley there vanished four lights at once in different corners of the room, and I struck another match in quivering haste, and stood hesitating whither to take it.’ From this we can see that the narrator’s complex sentence shows us his growing panic and his movement around the room and this mirrors his mad and frenetic nature. Furthermore, when he says ‘I know I thought suddenly of the moonlit corridor, and, with my head bowed and my arms over my face, made a run for the door’ his stoical demeanour is destroyed and is left with screaming primal horror. As the narrator is overwhelmed by his own fear, his actions and movements become more careless, hysterical and possessed: “I leapt panting and dishevelled from candle to candle in a vain struggle against the remorseless advance” His state of mind and character here clearly changed and the current fear he is expressing is exaggerated in the fear of the reader. This is because a once rational man has succumbed to the sheer evil of “Lorraine Castle” and “the Red Room” which shows us how powerful these supernatural forces are. The last character developments in “the Red Room” are his views at the end of the story, which can again be interpreted two different ways. He says that “Yes…the room is haunted” but also that what haunts it is “the worst of all things that haunt poor mortal man…and that is, in all its nakedness – Fear!” This could be telling us that the storyteller has finally succumbed to believing in the supernatural and makes the reader fearful of the powers themselves. However it could also be implying that the narrator is denying any existence of the supernatural by telling them it was a psychological state that scared him. This is another ambiguous scenario Wells has employed to force the reader to make decisions for himself, drawing him further into the story. The open, unresolved ending also leaves the tension and fear unexplained, making an effective ending to the story. In ‘The Signalman’ we see that the character is isolated in a valley, which is a secluded area, similar to the Red Room, as the narrator there was isolated in ‘The Red Room’. We do learn a bit at the start of the story about the signalman. We learn that as he has been abandoned for many years, his state of mind has significantly changed. We see this when he says ‘You had no feeling that they were conveyed to you in any supernatural way?’ Through the tones of this we learn that the signalman is starting to lose his grasp on sanity. We see this from his reaction from the call given from the stranger: ‘One would have thought, considering the nature of the ground, That he could not have doubted from what quarter the voice came; But instead of looking up to where I stood on the top of the steep cutting nearly over his head, he turned himself about and looked down the Line’ The signalman’s actions are unsettlingly inexplicable to start off with. He stands intently in the railway with his hand on his chin, not moving a muscle until they are face to face, ‘Before he stirred I was near enough to have touched him’. Also when they do meet he makes no attempt to start the conversation; instead he looks at the red light. He seems very mysterious and unpredictable, but this may be due to the amount of contact he has had with humans. However, this unsettles the reader from the start. Furthermore, the setting is also significant in conveying fear, as it is in ‘The Red Room.’ The cutting in ‘The Signalman’ would be rather dark; this darkness creates the threatening mood. It is also described as being ‘Extremely deep and unusually precipitous’ this gives connotations of physical danger, which is a warning to the man. Pathetic fallacy is used to create a sense of fear as it has implications of an unusual atmosphere. A feeling of depression is formed with the words ‘Solitary and dismal’. It seems like the place is very isolated and cut off from the real world, the perfect place for supernatural happenings, a ‘Great dungeon’. This gives a gothic feeling of isolation, torture and horror. In fact, the tunnel also creates suspense, why did...