Summary
Before the narrator leaves, the signalman admits he was once contented but is now troubled by something difficult to explain. The narrator agrees to come back the next night at eleven, when the signalman will be on shift again, to hear his explanation. The signalman insists, however, that the narrator not call out from up top. Confused and slightly frightened, the narrator agrees.
The signalman asks if he earlier called out “Below there!” because the words were conveyed to him in some supernatural way. The narrator says no. The two men wish each other good night and the narrator leaves, finding his way back to his inn without trouble.
The next night, distant clocks strike eleven as the narrator begins his descent down the steep zigzag path. The signalman is waiting with a candle lamp. The men shake hands and go to the box to resume the previous day's conversation.
The signalman admits he was troubled when he first saw the narrator because he mistook him for someone else, and it is this someone else that troubles him. He didn’t see their face, as it was obscured by the person’s left arm, while the right arm waved violently. The narrator imagines the gesture would be accompanied by shouts of “For god’s sake, clear the way!” The signalman explains he saw this person one moonlit night. They were standing by the red light near the tunnel, shouting and waving.
When the signalman ran toward the figure, it disappeared. He ran five hundred yards into the tunnel, then ran out faster because he has always had a “mortal abhorrence of the place.” He telegraphed that alarm had been given, but the responses from both ends of the line came back that all was well. As he hears the story, the narrator is frightened enough that he feels a sensation akin to a frozen finger running up his spine. However, he suggests that the signalman must have hallucinated the figure, and that the cries he heard were the wind whistling through the low valley and playing the telegraph wires like the strings of a harp.
The signalman says that six hours after the apparition, a horrific accident happened on the line; the dead bodies were brought out of the tunnel, right past the spot where the apparition had stood. The narrator fights a shudder; he insists it must have been a remarkable coincidence.
The signalman touches the narrator’s arm and, with a hollow-eyed look, says six or seven months later he saw the specter again, by the red light. This time, the figure had been standing with its hands over its face—a gesture of mourning. The same day the signalman noticed in the window of a passing train that a beautiful young woman had died suddenly as the train entered the tunnel. He signaled for the train to stop and she was brought into the signal box and laid on the floor.
Analysis
The story’s thematic concern with the supernatural continues to insinuate itself within the narrator’s otherwise stable reality when the signalman asks if he said “Below there!” because the words were conveyed to the narrator in some supernatural way. The narrator remains calm and he fulfills the signalman’s request not to call down, but the fright registered by the narrator’s body indicates that something isn’t right. However, the full mystery of his peculiar reaction to the motif line “Below there!” is prolonged until their next meeting, thus drawing out the story’s eerie suspense.
All four of the story’s major themes come together in the signalman’s dilemma. The supernatural appearance of the specter is particularly haunting for the signalman because he is unable to decode the cryptic message, and this helplessness plays against his natural sense of responsibility to the safety of train passengers. On both of the previous appearances, the signalman was helpless to act on the specter’s warnings; he had no recourse but to witness the dead bodies be carried out of the tunnel on the very spot the specter appeared.
The signalman’s disclosure presents the narrator with a dilemma of his own. The narrator resists chills and fright as he listens to the signalman’s story because he insists on maintaining a position of rationality: he believes the specter must not be real, and is instead the result of a hallucination based on the confluence of the wind creating strange sounds and the anxious isolation the signalman endures.
However, the narrator knows he must resist how he feels in order to uphold what he believes. He resorts to these justifications to shore up his own grasp on reality; to accept and believe in the signalman’s reality with credulity would upend his idea of a reality based in verifiable observation. Meanwhile, his body continues to register instinctive fear responses, suggesting that despite his cognitive understanding of reality, some part of him believes the line between living and dead is more porous than can be scientifically proven. Ultimately, he is helpless to prove or disprove what the signalman says.
The specter also conveys a particular type of helplessness. The specter’s desperate, mournful gestures suggest an externalization of the signalman’s genuine concern for other people’s lives, but the specter can also be seen, in a broader sense, as representing helplessness in the face of technological advancement. Trains and telegraphs are antiquated to contemporary readers, but these technologies were cutting-edge during the Victorian era in which Dickens lived. Victorians believed society would improve as technology advanced, but technological advancements are often met with panic about unforeseen consequences. Considering Dickens's brush with death in a train crash the year before he published “The Signalman,” the specter could be seen as a manifestation of a general unease about the uncertain toll rapid modernization was taking on humanity.
