How do the narrators of "The Signal-man" and of "The Red Room" affect the reader's interpretation of theme?

Whenever a narrative is told from a point of view other
than omniscient narrator, there is a limitation imposed upon the perspective of the
reader. For the reader must view the narrative through the perception of a single
narrator who cannot know all that happens. In the story "The Signal-Man" by Charles
Dickens, the narrator reports on what the signalman tells him and what this character
feels, but he notes,

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He directed a most curious look towards the red
light near the tunnel's mouth, and looked all about it, as if something were missing
from it, and then looked at
me.

This injection of his own
opinion is one that later affects the reader's interpretation of theme. For example, the
narrator comments,

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The monstrous thought came into my mind, as I
perused the fixed eyes and the saturnine face, that this was a spirit, not a man.  I
have speculated since, whether there may have been an infection in his
mind.

Likewise, the narrator
of "The Red Room" imposes his opinion upon the narrative. For instance, when the
narrator first arrives at the house that supposedly has a haunted room, he talks with
two old men and a woman whom he describes as “grotesque
custodians”:

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There is to my mind something inhuman in
senility, something crouching and atavistic; the human qualities seem to drop from old
people insensibly day by day. The three of them made me feel
uncomfortable.

In addition,
this narrator does not believe anyone else in the narrative. Thus, he causes the reader,
too, to be skeptical of the prospect of the Red Room being haunted. So when the
occurrences of the candle flames being blown out and “the indefinable quality of a
presence” exist for the narrator, the reader wonders if he has lost “the last vestiges
of reason” as he says, or if these happenings are real. Later, after the narrator
“remember[s] no more” and becomes conscious only after daylight, there is a suspension
of belief in the reader as to what has actually occurred. Although the narrator then
agrees with the old people that the room is indeed haunted, he explains that the “worst
of all the things that haunt poor mortal man…is, in all its nakedness--Fear!” Because
the “man with the shade” agrees--one whom the narrator earlier found repugnant--the
reader is influenced to accept this opinion and this influences interpretation of
theme.

In “The Signal-Man,” there is a also an original
skepticism in the narrator as he listens to all that the signalman describes of the
voice which warns him. Yet, there is the sense in the narrator of “the slow touch of a
frozen finger tracing out my spine,” and “a disagreeable shudder” and a feeling of
faintness which creeps over him along with the “remarkable coincidences” which
continually occur. These sensations are much like the fear to which Wells’s narrator
admits. Interestingly, this perspective later lends veracity to the concept of fear as
the cause of the death of the assiduous signalman, who “somehow was not clear of the
outer rail.”

The reader is clearly influenced by the
limited perspectives of the first-person narrators. Seen from their perspectives, the
theme of “Fear” as a powerful influence affecting the fate of the signalman and
affecting the narrator’s conclusions about the "haunting" of room of the old earl is
given verisimilitude (truthfulness) which thus influences the reader’s understanding of
the theme.