Dickens’s The Signalman must be one of the most enigmatic stories ever written, and though students find it difficult, they often come to recognize the art of its slippery. Heated debates can break out over who is really after whom in the story. It’s a dramatically compelling way to show students the power of ambiguity in a narrative and makes students really look at a text to find the places where it ‘means’ what it appears to mean.

As I have just suggested, this story haunts as it slips away from the reader’s grasp of the “truth.” Because where is the ‘truth’ in this story? Should we believe the fears of the lonely and isolated lineman who believes he is being hunted by a nemesis figure, predicting death and destruction? Or should we see these terrifying repetitions of horror as the symptoms of a sick mind clinging to the rational observations of the anonymous narrator and visitor from the lonely world of the signalman? Who are we to trust in this fallen world with the palpably fallen words of him?

My son is studying this text for his GCSE English Literature and I am very grateful to have a reason to reread this text which refuses to state its full meaning and which evades our ability to locate and name ‘truth’.

My first guess centered on a dislike for the narrator, who seemed like a rather malign intruder into the brooding gatekeeper’s crypt-like world. The narrator’s words ironically mirror those of the signalman’s nemesis and it seemed quite possible to this reader that the narrator IS the nemesis without perhaps even consciously or directly realizing this.

I am also struck by Dickens’s magnificent ability to explore the tension between repetition and coincidence, and the ambivalence of coincidence when symbolically retranslated as fate by a bewildered mind.

Lives are riddled with patterns (and our desire to discern and recognize patterns) and in this story, the bewildered and tormented signalman finds the return visits from both Nemesis and the narrator so unsettling that he seems to choose to embrace the certainty of literal extinction instead. of mind death. destabilizing uncertainty of progressive mental terror.

The Signalman, as the title of the story hints, explores the lonely situation of a railway worker whose daily rituals are mainly related to safety. The literal ‘signs’ from him avert death. However, the dramatic irony of the story reveals the strange ‘signals’ that the protagonist of the story seems to be receiving from an unknown source; Perhaps a ghost or just the misunderstood manifestations of a very lonely mind?

The opening story of the story seems strange and disturbing and I love the disorienting feeling of the environment. Where is the narrator and where is the signalman? And how are these geographical positions crucial to our understanding of the story and even its possible resolution? Because the dark, deep, crypt-like situation of the dank-looking signalman suggests hell, a “fallen” Post-Denic world. Such a scenario is reflected in the feverish quality of the signalman’s words, which lends a haunting fatalism to the actions and statements of the haunting figure. If Dickens was right (from direct experience of a rail accident) to attribute considerable danger to Victorian industrialization and the rail system, then the sinister and monstrous appearance of the steam train hurtling out of its dark tunnel fulfills many a nightmare. Freudian and contrasts the inhuman and mechanical against the malleable and human.

The powerful irony of the story’s first expression sums up the story’s dilemma and problem. Who is ‘down there’ and why is such an expression shared among various figures, all inevitably contributing to the signalman’s own destruction? who has been lowered into this pit by circumstance and social failure).

I love the joy of the title. What are signs after all? Can a signal exist without an audience and even without a translator? And is it simply a sign of the mental disorientation of the signalman searching for the source of the voice in the tunnel, or is it in fact a more revealing gesture of the narrator’s sinister duplicity? In other words, who can we trust to tell us where the source of truth lies? Everything in the story is created for us by the narrator. Could he create himself to follow his story? Of course! And part of the game of the story is the slipperiness of it. Its meaning always seems to slip away, to evade us.

The Signalman is, after all, a story of narrative imprisonment and entrapment… whatever you decide, you know it’s your decision and that other versions or readings lurk at every turn of the story.

How provocative the existential question:

“Is there some way I can go down and talk to you?”

What an ironic metaphor!

What is the answer and who can really answer this almost Faustian question! Would you go that way?