"The Signal-Man" and Other Stories Lesson Plan

How does Dickens use various literary elements to help build suspense and generate the ominous mood of the story?

Students should closely read the text looking for various examples of the literary elements utilized. Examples include but aren't limited to:

· Personification: "the wind and the wires took up the story with a long lamenting wail"; "glow of an angry sunset"

· Simile: the narrator describes his experience descending down to the railroad as "as if I had left the natural world"

· Foreshadow: the signalman looking toward the tunnel instead of up at the narrator at the start of the novel; the narrator momentarily thinks the signalman is "a spirit, not a...