Alienation In Charles Dickens's The Signal-Man

“The slow touch of a frozen finger [traces] out my spine” (Dickens, 317). This is how Charles Dickens relates the fear of “The Signal-Man”’s narrator, and perhaps most accurately defines the sensation that overcomes the body when confronted with the uncanny: an unforeseen and unwelcome touch, a shock of jarring cold, a sense of ill-ease that finds no grounded basis in the corporeal. In Sigmund Freud’s essay on the uncanny, or the unheimlich, he describes the mental workings of this fear as the separation of a familiar idea from its comfort (240). He gives examples of ways in which this alienation occurs, this repression of the known from the understanding, and pays particular attention to the concept of “unintended recurrence” (236). Essentially, Freud describes coincidences that feel too coincidental and the terror of finding oneself repeatedly in the same situation, especially without the availability of a feasible exit (236-237). …show more content…
This authorial uncanniness manifests in a variety of ways across literature, but the symbolic decline remains perhaps one of the most potent. Because of the inherent isolation in a downward movement, the sense of removal from the familiar, its usage in horror expresses a particular cogency in establishing the uncanny, and this appears throughout Dickens’s “The Signal-Man.” As such, this paper focuses on the methodology by which the notion of decline relates to the uncanny through the lenses of setting, word choice, dialogue, and sentence