The Character and Experiences of the Narrator - Essay Example

The Character and Experiences of the Narrator in The Judge’s House and The Red Room Maclolm Malcolmson, in The Judge’s House and the un d narrator in The Red Room, are vital to the reader’s understanding of the supernatural worlds that are eventually presented in each story. The characters are used to draw the reader from their ‘normal’ physical environment into the terrifying landscape of ghosts. While the two narrators have very different experiences of their ghosts:- the one ending up dead, the other surviving – there are similarities in their characters and outlooks upon the world that make them ideal figures to contrast the natural with the supernatural world. In The Judge’s House the reader is introduced to the character of Malcolm Malcolmson through an omniscient third person narrator. Malcolmson “feared the attractions of the seaside, and also he feared completely rural isolation.”1 So the dominant feature of this character, at least at first, is “fear”. He would thus seem to be not very well suited to dealing well with an encounter with a ghost. Malcolmson is deliberately removing himself from everyone and everything he knows in order to study for exams. He is obviously of middle or upper class origins and determined to do well in his academic work. Soon the reader discovers that he is a mathematician, and possesses the self-confidence (some might say arrogance) of a man of science who thinks that only things that can be measured in a scientific sense are worth considering. Thus when he is warned about the terrors of the judge’s house, he replies casually, “ . . . but my dear Mrs. Witham, indeed you need not be concerned about me! A man who is reading for the Mathematical Tripos has too much to think of to be disturbed by any of these mysterious somethings . . . “2 He thus rejects the supernatural in a good-humored but essentially dismissive manner. He has the confidence of youth, of education and of science. The rest of the story reveals how this confidence is demolished piece by piece. On his initial encounter with the rats that swarm through the house, on his first night of study, Malcomson ends up feeling remarkably at home with the vermin: “for a little while the rats disturbed him somewhat with their perpetual scampering, but he got accustomed to the noise as one does to the ticking of the clock or the roar of moving water. . . “3. The rats, at least these non-supernatural rats, are part of the physical world that Malcolmson is studying and feels comfortable with, at least to a point. The fact that “his problem was still unsolved” at the end of the night foreshadows the fact that Malcolmson will soon be thrust into a far more serious “problem” that will eventually lead to his death. When the massive rat that is obviously much more than a rat starts to appear, Malcolmson keeps his composure for some time, eventually throwing his books at the animal in order to scare it away. The book-throwing is a metaphor for the attempt of science/mathematics to dismiss the supernatural, and it is only his Bible that actually succeeds in hitting the rat and, at least temporarily, scaring it away. The Bible, representative of the ‘good supernatural’ as opposed to the ‘bad supernatural’ of the rat wins for a while. But Malcolmson, not possessed of much imagination, merely thinks “the Bible my mother gave me . . . what an odd coincidence.”4 As he is drawn towards his death, Malcolmson finds that the rats’ “presence gave him a sense of companionship”. He feels so comfortable in the world of the physical that he can find comfort in animals that most people find disgusting and/or terrifying. He deals with his fear through relying upon the comfort of the physical, however horrible that physical may be. When he discovers that the rope that the huge rat runs up and down was the hangman’s rope, the inquisitive nature of the scientist comes to the fore as he finds that “there seemed a sort of deadly interest in it”5, and it is an interest that remains when the Judge himself appears, released apparently from his embodiment as the massive rat. Malcolmson shows himself to be courageous when the Judge’s ghost finally appears, as while initially “his knees shook, and heavy drops of sweat came on his forehead” he soon regains his composure, “he was young and plucky, and pulled himself together.” He says to himself that he must not become a “crazy fool”, returns to the comfort of the rats’ eyes, but eventually falls into the Judge’s “icy fingers” as they “touch his throat as he adjusted the rope.”6 The ghost then hangs Malcolmson, who is found by the villagers as he is hanging from the alarm bell. The fact that the young man is essentially overcome in a physical manner by the Judge’s ghost is ironic because Malcolmson had always relied upon the safety and security of the physical world when being drawn into the supernatural. But at the end of the story the supernatural invades the world of the natural/physical and kills the young man in a very direct manner. It is this irony that causes the “malignant smile” on the face of the Judge in his portrait once he has returned to the painting after the student’s death. The fact that he is called “student” once again reminds the reader of his youth and the fact that his ‘studies’ culminated in the ultimate failure: death. Malcolmson discovered too late the very physical power of the supernatural. In The Red Room a similarly skeptical character is introduced at the beginning of the story. It starts with, ““I can assure you,” said I, “that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me.””7 This story is told in the first-person, as opposed to the third-person of The Judge’s House. The reader can thus safely assume at the beginning of the story that the protagonist will survive whatever is going to happen to him. Like Malcolmson, the unnamed narrator is suspicious of the supposedly superstitious beliefs of the old people who claim to know more of the haunted room than he does. He dismisses their opinions by stating, “I half suspected the old people were trying to enhance the spiritual terrors of their house by their droning insistence.”8 The word droning encapsulates the narrator’s view of the old: they are boring, ignorant and even somehow less than human: “there is to my mind something inhuman in senility, something crouching and atavistic. . . “9 The narrator in The Red Room is more unpleasantly arrogant than Malcolmson was in the first story. His pride is being set up for a massive fall. Malcolmson was an essentially sympathetic character, the narrator is more harsh. The old people with which he converses have something monstrous about them, such as the details of “the man with the withered arm” and another with “decaying yellow teeth” and yet another with “eyes, small and bright and inflamed.”10 The old people are described in the same way as the rats were, at least initially, in The Judge’s House. But unlike the rats, they are never more sympathetically portrayed as the young man, seemingly well-educated and well-brought up, goes into the “chilly, echoing passage” and thence to the haunted room. As with many arrogant people, his superficial confidence soon diminishes as it merely takes the old furniture that has been left in the house to affect him “in spite of my efforts to keep myself at a matter-of-fact phase.”11 The difference between this young man and Malcolmson is that he goes into the room knowing that it is meant to be haunted. It is this ‘knowledge’ that quickly grows within him, causing him to grab hold of his pistol as he goes into the room. Once inside he resolves “to make a systematic examination of the place at once, and dispel the fanciful suggestions of its obscurity before they obtained a hold on me.”12 He relies upon rational exploration of the room, as if this can protect him from whatever supernatural forces that lurk there. Like the rats’ eyes in The Judge’s House, the narrator of The Red Room relies upon apparently normal physical objects, in this case the flames of the candles, to reassure him. But the flames, and their mysterious extinguishing, however many times he relights them, are the sum total of what the ‘ghost’ constitutes of in this story. The narrator ends up panicking as the candles keep on going out and falls over, almost reduced to an animal-like terror of “wild crying as I darted to and for . . . a horrible sensation of falling that lasted an age, of my last frantic effort to keep my footing, and then I remember no more.”13 Reduced with remarkable speed (a few minutes) from an incredulous scoffer at the supernatural to one who totally believes that the room is haunted. This, unlike the haunting in The Judge’s House, is no ordinary haunting, for it is the “fear, fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms . . . it followed me through the corridor, it fought against me in the room.”14 The ghost within this story is the ghost of fear that exists within every human being. Unlike The Judge’s House, in which the ghost takes on a very real and physical form capable of hanging the student (or at least of driving him to a madness in which he hangs himself), it is unclear whether any ghost actually does exist outside of the narrator’s imagination in The Red Room. This does not make the ghost, or the sense of haunting, any less real, for a ghost contained within ourselves cannot be escaped from. Both these stories draw the reader slowly into a world of the supernatural by making the protagonist a very ordinary and incredulous young person. The reader can imagine him or herself in the same position, and thus walks in the shoes of the character/narrator into the haunted place. This creates an intimacy between the reader and the character that makes the stories highly effective and moving. ____________________________________________ Works Cited Stoker, Bram. TheJudge’sHouse. http:www.sff.net/people/DoyleMacDonald/l_jdghus Wells, HG. The Red Room. http://www.twilightharbor.com/moonmistress/stories Read More