The red light that the ghost stands by whenever it haunts the signalman comes to represent the unavoidability of death. The signalman explains to the narrator that the first time he saw the ghost, it waved and cried out. The second time, it covered its eyes, and in recent hauntings, it gestured frantically. Though the ghost’s exact behavior differs, two things remain constant: the ghost is always standing by the red light, and someone always dies in the aftermath. In this way, the red light, or “Danger-light,” warns of approaching death.
However, the red light serves a practical purpose as well, warning the signalman of approaching trains; though it may be tied to the supernatural, the light is actually part of a functional safety system. But while the signalman should be able to stop a train’s approach if there’s danger, he can’t avoid the supernatural deaths on the rail line, even though they’re indicated in advance by the same warning system of the red light.
Despite his inability to stop the first two accidents, the signalman fixates on the ghost and the red light—because he’s certain there will be a third accident, he thinks it’s his responsibility to stop it. Unfortunately, while he’s standing by the red light, likely looking for the ghost, the signalman is killed by a passing train. Because the ghost appeared near the red light during the third haunting, the light was presumably warning the signalman about his own death—the signalman misinterpreted its purpose, believing that he was supposed to stop that death the same way he would stop a faulty train. The light was built to prevent accidents, so humans like the signalman falsely believe that, with tools like this, they have control over death and can therefore avoid it. But the signalman’s final position near the red light ironically reveals that, while the light is supposed to warn about death in an attempt to prevent it, it actually played a role in the signalman’s death, luring him to the tunnel with the misguided hope of helping. His foretold death was unavoidable not in spite of the red light’s warning, but because of it. After the signalman’s death, the narrator notices that the red light is off, suggesting that it fulfilled its true purpose: not prevent death, but to mock humans with death’s unavoidability.
The Red Light Quotes in The Signalman
His post was in as solitary and dismal a place as ever I saw. On either side, a dripping-wet wall of jagged stone, excluding all view but a strip of sky; the perspective one way only a crooked prolongation of this great dungeon; the shorter perspective in the other direction terminating in a gloomy red light, and the gloomier entrance to a black tunnel, in whose massive architecture there was a barbarous, depressing, and forbidding air. So little sunlight ever found its way to this spot, that it had an earthy, deadly smell; and so much cold wind rushed through it, that it struck chill to me, as if I had left the natural world.
“‘One moonlight night,’ said the man, ‘I was sitting here, when I heard a voice cry, “Halloa! Below there!” I started up, looked from that door, and saw this someone else standing by the red light near the tunnel, waving as I just now showed you. The voice seemed hoarse with shouting, and it cried, “Look out! Look out!” And then again, “Halloa! Below there! Look out!” I caught up my lamp, turned it on red, and ran towards the figure, calling, “What’s wrong? What has happened? Where?”
[…]
‘I ran on into the tunnel, five hundred yards. I stopped, and held my lamp above my head, and saw the figures of the measured distance, and saw the wet stains stealing down the walls and trickling through the arch. I ran out again faster than I had run in (for I had a mortal abhorrence of the place upon me), and I looked all round the red light with my own red light, and I went up the iron ladder to the gallery atop of it, and I came down again, and ran back here. I telegraphed both ways. “An alarm has been given. Is anything wrong?” The answer came back, both ways: “All well.”’
His pain of mind was most pitiable to see. It was the mental torture of a conscientious man, oppressed beyond endurance by an unintelligible responsibility involving life.
‘When it first stood under the Danger-light,’ he went on, putting his dark hair back from his head, and drawing his hands outward across and across his temples in an extremity of feverish distress, ‘why not tell me where that accident was to happen—if it must happen? Why not tell me how it could be averted—if it could have been averted? When on its second coming it hid its face, why not tell me, instead, “She is going to die. Let them keep her at home?” If it came, on those two occasions, only to show me that its warnings were true, and so to prepare me for the third, why not warn me plainly now? And I, Lord help me! A mere poor signalman on this solitary station! Why not go to somebody with credit to be believed, and power to act?’
Before pursuing my stroll, I stepped to the brink, and mechanically looked down, from the point from which I had first seen him. I cannot describe the thrill that seized upon me, when, close at the mouth of the tunnel, I saw the appearance of a man, with his left sleeve across his eyes, passionately waving his right arm.
The nameless horror that oppressed me passed in a moment, for in a moment I saw that this appearance of a man was a man indeed, and that there was a little group of other men standing at a short distance, to whom he seemed to be rehearsing the gesture he made. The Danger-light was not yet lighted. Against its shaft a little low hut entirely new to me, had been made of some wooden supports and tarpaulin. It looked no bigger than a bed.
The Red Light Symbol Timeline in The Signalman
