The Signal-Man

“The Signal-Man” is a gothic short story about the potential, as well as limits, of human communication in facilitating responsible action. It focuses on the titular signal man’s deep anxiety as a result of receiving repeated warning signals, exploring the pain—and trauma—of ethical existence.

The story explores the themes of The Burden of Responsibility, The Supernatural and the Limits of Human Understanding, and Communication, Connection, and (Social) Mobility in the aftermath of the 1840s railway boom in England. The supernatural is not relegated to the decrepit ancestral castles or haunted Victorian mansions that are the typical staples of gothic fiction. Instead, it inhabits modern technology, asserting itself on an alternative acoustical plane via the electric bell and appearing on the railway track itself. Dickens brings the ghostly to a modern infrastructure designed to bridge physical and informational gaps as he explores the limitations of human communication, obligation, and agency.

The story, in fact, begins with cross-class miscommunication, or at least misperception. The middle-class narrator reaches out to the working-class signal man and finds that the latter challenges many of his preconceptions. Having initially assumed that the signal man’s underground workplace is inherently “dismal,” the narrator revises his assumptions after listening to the signal man describe his own experience of his job: “Regarding those many long and lonely hours of which I seemed to make so much, he could only say that the routine of his life had shaped itself into that form, and he had grown used to it” (314). While drawing attention to this first misreading, the narrator also emphasizes the signal man’s articulateness and general facility with language, noting that he speaks in “well-chosen words” and has even “learned a [foreign] language down there” (314). The signal man’s fluency in yet another “language”—railroad signaling—is essential to his professionalism:

He was several times interrupted by the little bell, and had to read off messages, and send replies. Once he had to stand without the door, and display a flag as a train passed, and make some verbal communication to the driver. In the discharge of his duties, I observed him to be remarkably exact and vigilant, breaking off his discourse at a syllable, and remaining silent until what he had to do was done (315).

The signal man easily moves between discourses, fluent in several forms of communication. After watching the signal man read messages, send replies, display flags, and speak with the train drivers, the narrator rightfully concludes that he is “one of the safest of men to be employed in that capacity” (315). The narrator reads the signal man’s work differently too, and he begins to recognize the signal man as exceptional (rather than subjugated): He is well-adjusted, articulate, intelligent, attentive, and highly conscientious.

The story therefore subverts the narrator’s (and the presumed middle-class reader’s) assumptions about both setting and character, instead fostering a more nuanced understanding of the signal man’s life and ethical angst. This understanding that develops between the narrator and the signal man implies that the narrator may be able to ease the signal man’s “troubles.” Communication between the two men becomes increasingly meaningful in the attention that the narrator pays to the signal man’s story; the narrator is not a mere tourist out to consume “local color” but a man willing to invest himself in the signal man’s unusual predicament.

The relation between the human and the supernatural is much more difficult to determine. It is unclear whether the (purported) ghost sends warning signals to the signal man because of his exceptional conscientiousness; if so, it is also unclear whether the ghost seeks to torture or help the signal man. The ghost’s motivations are impossible to determine, but the signal man is left unmoored as a result of this communication, as he cannot determine what the dangers signaled by the ghosts actually are, only that they are imminent. Because the signal man is never able to translate the ghost’s signal into an actionable signal of his own, he is forced to occupy a psychologically “clammy” and “oozy” position that is not viable. The signal man cannot endure this torturous state in which he is aware of a danger about which he can do nothing. He becomes increasingly distracted, increasingly focused on deciphering the exact nature of the danger, to the point that he seems not to hear the train that eventually strikes and kills him.

It is not the physical setting that is uninhabitable, then, but the signal man’s psychological confusion and lack of ethical agency. The mystery of the ghost’s frustratingly limited signal is not something that can be “solved” by the signal man or anyone else, including the narrator and the reader. The mystery refuses detection, revealing human limitations in the attempt to discharge duties with care. The signal man’s exceptional conscientiousness becomes a dangerous distraction in the midst of the unknowable, as he refuses to yield to that which is beyond his comprehension.

Those who take an interest in the signal man—the narrator and Tom—prove equally incapable of mitigating distress. Tom’s desperate attempt to save the signal man from being run over dramatizes the compulsion to care for others that so often has no actionable outlet. Tom simultaneously screams his warning and covers his eyes, knowing that his warning will fail (and not wanting to see its failure) yet continuing nonetheless. It seems impossible that Tom will not be traumatized by the signal man’s death—a death that is the result of a similar trauma. Neither he nor Tom can stop trying, even though their care is of “no use.” There is no “reason” for something of “no use,” and this care exceeds reason, becoming a mystery in itself.