30 pages • 1 hour read
Charles DickensThe Signal-Man
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1866A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Zigzag Path and Railway Track
The zigzag path and railway track are both designed as means to ends. They are spaces people move through to get from one place to another, but they themselves are uninhabitable. Both spaces thus symbolize the interpretive limbo that the signal man experiences and that the story invites in the reader.
The path connects the world above, from which the narrator calls out in the story’s first sentence, to the dark underground “cutting” where the signal man works. While there are moments of “light” in the story, the narrative itself occupies a space akin to the path, situated in a no-man’s land between light and dark, the rational and the supernatural, the middle and lower classes, with clear interpretation unavailable. More specifically, the signal man himself is stuck with a message that he cannot read and also cannot deliver; he cannot keep communication moving from one point to another.
This limbo is not viable, as shown in his tragic death: The train, moving to its destination so quickly that it cannot stop, cuts him down as he stands in the literal line of duty. The ending serves as both a class critique—the signal man is killed by the machines he ostensibly controls—and a cautionary tale regarding The Supernatural and the Limits of Human Understanding.
The Bell
The electric bell is part of a telegraphic system that sends point-to-point text messages between railway signal stations to ensure safer travel. These telegraphic systems were used widely by railways by the 1840s, enabling their expansion.
Though alone at his post, the signal man is “at all times liable to be called by his electric bell” (314); he is in constant conversation with other signal men through this technology. Yet, as the signal man confides to the narrator, the ghost also uses the bell:
I have never confused the spectre’s ring with the man’s. The ghost’s ring is a strange vibration in the bell that it derives from nothing else, and I have not asserted that the bell stirs to the eye. I don’t wonder that you failed to hear it. But I heard it (318).
What the signal man hears is not heard by others; whether this is because the narrator’s senses are not as sharp as the signal man’s or because the signal man imagines the sound is unclear. Once again, the very technology designed to expand human communication and travel comes to symbolize confusion.
Signaling
The act of signaling—using means other than language to indicate changing conditions—is a motif that runs throughout the story, developing the themes of The Burden of Responsibility and Communication, Connection, and (Social) Mobility.
Up until the appearance of the ghost, the signal man has performed his job perfectly. The designation of him as simply “the signal man” at first seems to reflect the narrator’s own interests, who defines the signal man by his duty within the industry (in which the narrator is interested). The broader narrative, however, reveals that this is not just a generic designation but a designation of exceptionalism: The signal man is the signal man. “No man in England knew his work better” (321), one of the onlookers assures the narrator as they stand over the signal man’s dead body.
Yet the signal man, known for being so “careful,” can no longer effectively signal with the flags, lamps, lights, and bell. The story explores the psychological burden of this inability, whether perceived or real, without providing any definitive solutions to it, signaling a warning to the reader that is similar to the ghost’s in its indeterminacy.
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By Charles Dickens
