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.
Themes
The Burden of Responsibility
Although the signal man did not take full advantage of his academic opportunities and must therefore lie in the proverbial bed he made, he does not express a dislike for his job or think that he is “above” it, as the narrator initially does. On the contrary, the job provides the time and security for him to educate himself, and he takes advantage of lulls in his duties to learn mathematics and a foreign language. The signal man has thus created a space in which he can be responsible for himself and others, having grown not only accustomed to his job but excellent at it, as an onlooker confirms after the signal man is killed: “No man in England knew his work better,” the bystander comments (321), with Tom echoing, “I knew him to be very careful” (321).
The responsibilities of his job make the work meaningful, and the signal man perfectly fulfills these responsibilities until the ghost begins to make appearances. His job then becomes unbearable due to his inability to send effective warning signals: He is haunted not only by the supernatural but also by a dawning recognition of his inability to signal effectively enough to discharge his duties. As the narrator explains, “It was the mental torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life” (319).
The signal man’s dilemma is not unique. The narrator himself quickly comes to share it, as he responds to the signal man’s story by deliberating how best to help the signal man while also safeguarding the lives of those on the train. When a train hits and kills the signal man, the narrator therefore questions to what extent he is responsible for the signal man’s death, but it’s far from clear that he could or should have done anything differently. The moral calculus involved was complex—the narrator did not want to get the signal man in trouble with his employers—and his knowledge of the situation was incomplete. Likewise, while there is nothing more that Tom could have done to prevent this death, he must also now live with his inability to save the signal man.
The story therefore dramatizes the double-edged sword of interesting oneself in others’ well-being. It’s natural, Dickens suggests, for relations of responsibility to arise organically through attention, beginning with the signal man’s attentiveness to his signaling and expanding out to the narrator’s attentiveness to the signal man. In many instances, however, no amount of responsibility can prevent tragedy, though the sense that it “ought” to do so can generate trauma.
The Supernatural and the Limits of Human Understanding
The psychological confusion and ethical limbo that the ghost’s frustratingly vague warning breeds in the signal man is the gothic heart of the story. The supernatural—literally, that which goes beyond the natural—is a world that exceeds human understanding and therefore cannot be fully interpreted or known.
This world might seem to exist in contrast to the human-created technological world of the train and its signaling apparatuses (the electric bell and the telegraphic system, as well as the lamps, lights, and signal flags)—a modern, coordinated system designed to transport people and messages from one place/person to another efficiently and without confusion. However, the story depicts the supernatural as inhabiting the technology that is designed for human-to-human communication and clear signaling, transforming the very register on which the bell rings, for example. The supernatural renders technology no longer an instrument of supposed clarity but one of uncanniness and ambiguity.
The narrator spends much of the story attempting to demystify these apparently supernatural occurrences. He responds to the story of the first visitation, for example, by assuring the signal man that “figures, originating in disease of the delicate nerves that minister to the functions of the eye, were known to have often troubled patients, some of whom […] had even proved it by experiments upon themselves” (317). Nevertheless, his explanations seem designed to comfort himself as much as the signal man.
A creeping, visceral dread underpins the narrator’s reactions to the story—he experiences frequent chills as he listens—and the supernatural is never far from his mind; when he first meets the signal man, he has the sense that he is looking at a “spirit.” His unknowing repetition of the ghost’s words at the start of the story demonstrate the futility of trying to rationalize the supernatural. Before he even involves himself in the signal man’s story, he is involved in a supernatural sense.
It is fitting, then, that the story ends in ambiguity, despite the narrator’s attempt to draw connections between Tom’s and the ghost’s warnings and gestures. This final move by the narrator echoes the more dramatic and desperate attempts at interpretation by the signal man. While some gothic stories incorporate the 19th-century genre of detective fiction, inaugurated by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Signal-Man” reveals only the “evidence” of human limitations and the necessary but painful limbo of ethical struggle, never yielding to the supposed mastery of human detection. All the signal man learns through his contact with the supernatural is his inability to ever be a fully responsible agent (and thus superhuman) in the natural world in which he exists.
Communication, Connection, and (Social) Mobility
Lines of communication (the signaling system) and lines of connection (the railway system) are not kept clear in “The Signal-Man,” and the story traces the way these lines, supposed to enable mobility, break down and get stuck. What’s more, these failures unfold against a backdrop of social immobility, suggesting a parallel critique of Victorian England’s rigid class system in an age of rapidly developing technology.
The narrator is initially fixated on what he sees as the signal man’s depressing immobility: His signaling job is not only a solitary one but also below ground, performed from within the prescribed area of the dark railway cutting. Adding to this stasis is the narrator’s sense that the job is “beneath” the signal man and that he is “stuck” as much occupationally and socially as he is physically. This perception of the signal man’s physical and occupational stasis contrasts with the narrator’s description of his own mobility. Staying at a local inn, the narrator is transitory, coming and going from the railway cutting as he pleases and taking long walks at his leisure. Though the reader cannot know for sure, it is likely that he arrived at this spot by way of the train (and the signal man’s work). The narrator’s fixation on the signal man as signal man contributes to this perceived contrast in mobility; since the narrator is disinterested in the signal man’s current life outside of his job (and the cutting), the reader learns nothing about it.
While the signal man himself largely accepts his class status, the “trouble” he describes does involve being “stuck.” The problem lies in his inability to move messages safely through the telegraphic lines so that people can move safely on the railway tracks: “If I telegraph Danger, on either side of me, or on both, I can give no reason for it [...] I should get into trouble, and do no good” (319). He is unable either to read the ghost’s signal fully or to send what he thinks is the necessary message of danger. The signal man cannot get this signal out of his “box.” Stuck in communicative limbo, the signal man fittingly ends up stuck on the tracks, seemingly unable to hear Tom’s warning whistle or calls, “cut down” on the line he so desperately tried to keep clear and safe. The very systems designed to increase mobility, sending messages from one person to another in order to move people from one place to another, come to a screeching halt that is deadly.
That the signal man’s predicament is implicitly linked to his class position is something even the middle-class narrator recognizes, as he realizes his efforts to help the signal man could result in his firing if he isn’t careful. However, the clearest statement of the connection comes from the signal man himself, who remarks that someone of a different class might be better equipped to handle the ghost’s warnings: “A mere poor signal-man on this solitary station! Why not go to somebody with credit to be believed, and power to act?” (320). His words point to a key paradox: The signal man’s class makes him unimportant and disposable in society’s eyes, but the work he is doing is a matter of life and death. Likewise, he spends his days facilitating the movement of people and information, but he himself has no agency or voice. The story thus suggests that technological innovation has created contradictions that render the British class system, already unfair, increasingly untenable.
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