The Signal-Man

Dickens authors the story from the narrator’s first-person point of view, so the narrator’s perspective mediates between the signal man and the reader. The narrator seems reliable, inspiring trust in the signal man through his attentive listening, and inviting trust in the reader. Moreover, he consciously attempts to approach the ghost without making immediate judgments, setting aside all “questions of reality and unreality” so that he can better understand and help the signal man (320), even though he is skeptical of the ghost as a supernatural entity.

The narrator “reads” his world carefully, providing a conscientious lens through which to approach the signal man and the purported ghosts. That even this lens proves insufficient to decode the story’s mystery underscores Dickens’s depiction of The Supernatural and the Limits of Human Understanding. Ultimately, the narrator’s first-person point of view on the signal man replicates the signal man’s position in relation to the ghost: Both are attempting to understand their subject of interest without being able to inhabit or fully know that subject.