Why Does Dickens Build A Sense Of Fear
How does Dickens build a sense of fear throughout The Signalman?
The Signalman by Charles Dickens is a ghost story written in 1886. It is about a signalman who constantly sees a ghost that forewarns him about deaths. Dickens wrote this piece after he was involved in a train crash. He wrote it because he knew the Victorians were afraid of this new idea of trains and they were scared because they saw the dangers of them.
Dickens develops fear in the story using a description of the surroundings such as the trench. For example he writes, “Extremely deep and unusually precipitate”. This creates a tense mood because if the trench is “extremely deep” then there is a danger of falling and injuring yourself. If the area is “unusually precipitate”” you can slip and fall due to the dampness. This is effective because the audience is careful with everything and doesn’t want the character to fall. …show more content…
The adjective “dark” makes you have a negative feeling towards him because darkness is associated with scariness. “Sallow” makes the signalman seem unhealthy and pale, as if he’d just seen a ghost. Describing the signalman as “shadowed” makes you think of him as a man who has a bad aura around him and a bad future to meet. You would also think he has secrets that he keeps in the dark. The audience likes this because they want to know his secret, or what will happen to him.
Dickens builds a sense of fear by linking two points of the story at the beginning. These points are “I found a way long enough to give me time to recall a singular air of reluctance” and “a visitor was a rarity; not an unwelcome rarity, I hoped?”. It is clear that the signalman has quite a lonesome occupation and so it is unusual to encounter visitors. It is possible to infer from the text that the train conductor is hesitant due to the fact that the narrator had said the exact words of the
The Signalman by Charles Dickens is a ghost story written in 1886. It is about a signalman who constantly sees a ghost that forewarns him about deaths. Dickens wrote this piece after he was involved in a train crash. He wrote it because he knew the Victorians were afraid of this new idea of trains and they were scared because they saw the dangers of them.
Dickens develops fear in the story using a description of the surroundings such as the trench. For example he writes, “Extremely deep and unusually precipitate”. This creates a tense mood because if the trench is “extremely deep” then there is a danger of falling and injuring yourself. If the area is “unusually precipitate”” you can slip and fall due to the dampness. This is effective because the audience is careful with everything and doesn’t want the character to fall. …show more content…
The adjective “dark” makes you have a negative feeling towards him because darkness is associated with scariness. “Sallow” makes the signalman seem unhealthy and pale, as if he’d just seen a ghost. Describing the signalman as “shadowed” makes you think of him as a man who has a bad aura around him and a bad future to meet. You would also think he has secrets that he keeps in the dark. The audience likes this because they want to know his secret, or what will happen to him.
Dickens builds a sense of fear by linking two points of the story at the beginning. These points are “I found a way long enough to give me time to recall a singular air of reluctance” and “a visitor was a rarity; not an unwelcome rarity, I hoped?”. It is clear that the signalman has quite a lonesome occupation and so it is unusual to encounter visitors. It is possible to infer from the text that the train conductor is hesitant due to the fact that the narrator had said the exact words of the