The Red Room

The narrator of “The Red Room,” as illustrated by his direct response to his first moments in the Red Room itself, views uncertainty as a weakness, one that will let fear and paranoia destabilize a rational individual. When the dark of the Red Room unnerves him, he “resolve[s] to make a systematic examination of the place at once, and dispel the fanciful suggestions of its obscurity before they obtain[…] a hold on [him].” In other words, he thinks having concrete knowledge of his surroundings will allow him to face the Red Room without fear. This effort is rendered unsuccessful by his candles extinguishing on their own. Though he assumes this is caused by a draft, he cannot confirm it, and his fear grows with his mounting sense of uncertainty. Such an effect is similarly used on the readers throughout the story. “The Red Room” is rife with ambiguity, from its nameless characters to its vague references to past characters’ “tragic ends.” Even the narrator’s experience in the Red Room is left ambiguous—readers never know what exactly caused the candles to go out or if the narrator is right in his assumption that it is fear that haunts the room. Through both his narrator and the storytelling, Wells posits that it is uncertainty and ambiguity that leads to fear. Wells effectively puts readers in the narrator’s shoes by refusing to fully confirm what, exactly, happened in the Red Room—after all, it’s not necessarily clear that the narrator was haunted solely by fear, nor is it ever confirmed that the candles wink out one by one simply because of a draft in the rom. This, in turn, gives rise to the same unsettling ambiguity that the narrator himself is forced to face in the darkness of the Red Room, ultimately underscoring the extent to which uncertainty fuels fear.