"The Signal-Man" and Other Stories Literary Elements

Short story; horror

The story is set at the entrance of a train tunnel in England in the 1860s

The story is narrated by an unnamed narrator; the story stays within the limitations of the narrator's first-person point of view

The tone is haunting yet skeptical; the mood is ominous and eerie

The protagonist is the signalman; the antagonist is the specter who haunts him

The major conflict in the story is the signalman's inability to decode the specter's cryptic message. He feels responsible for taking action but doesn't know what action to take without appearing to have lost his mind.

The story reaches its climax when the narrator learns the signalman died in the way the specter presaged.

At the beginning of the story, the signalman looks toward the tunnel rather than up to the narrator calling down to him. His peculiar behavior foreshadows the eventual revelation that the signalman has been visited by the specter.

As a ghost story, "The Signalman" is filled with ominous images in which inanimate or non-human objects display eerie signs of life. For example, at one point, the narrator describes how "the wind and the wires took up the story with a long lamenting wail," ascribing to the wind and the telegraph wires the human capacity to feel emotions and tell stories.