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Identifying Mood and Tone| L-1
COMPREHENSION SKILLS PRACTICE
An
author’s attitude toward a subject, theme, or audience is reflected in the mood or tone of the
text. Mood can be created in a number of ways, usually through imagery and word choice, and can
be conveyed through descriptions of characters, setting, dialogue, actions, or any combination of
these within the plot. The mood an author creates will affect the overall impression and meaning
a reader draws from the text.
Charles Dickens sets the tone for Great Expectations in the novel’s first few pages. We first meet
Pip, the narrator and main character, as he is visiting a churchyard in the late afternoon. Pip tells
the reader that he knows his father’s name from his sister, for whom he does not give a first name,
and from his father’s tombstone. The reader has already been told that this is not a cheerful story.
The mood is somber and dark. Dickens reinforces this mood in the next few pages. Pip meets
an escaped convict who holds Pip upside down and then sits him on a tombstone. The convict
lets Pip go after forcing him to promise to bring back food and a metal file so the convict can cut
through his chains by threatening to have his partner kill Pip and his family. As Pip is leaving he
turns and watches the convict go and describes the scene before him.
The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped to look after
him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so
black; and the sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black lines
intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly make out the only two black
things in all the prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the
beacon by which the sailors steered — like an unhooped cask upon a pole — an
ugly thing when you were near it; the other a gibbet, with some chains hanging to
it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if
he were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back to hook himself
up again. It gave me a terrible turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting
their heads to gaze after him, I wondered whether they thought so too. I looked all
round for the horrible young man, and could see no signs of him. But, now I was
frightened again, and ran home without stopping.
Pip is describing the sunset over the marshes in black and “angry red.” The only identifiable landmarks are an ugly pole and a place where a pirate had been chained and probably left to die. This
description confirms the bleak mood Dickens has worked to create.
Not all stories have a mood this dark. In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain describes
Huck’s life on the Mississippi River.
Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder
was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark — which
was a candle in a cabin window; and sometimes on the water you could see a
spark or two — on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle
or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had
the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look
up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.
The mood in this passage is peaceful and serene. The reader can almost see Huck and Jim floating along the river on their raft.
Copyright © 2007 Taylor Associates/Communications, Inc.
ReadingPlus
Taylor Associates
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Identifying Mood and Tone| L-1
COMPREHENSION SKILLS PRACTICE
Student Name_______________________________________________________________
For each of the following excerpts, choose what mood the author is creating.
1. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this, and nothing more.” (Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven)
a. happy
b. melancholy
c. angry
d. scary
2. Well, when Tom and me got to the edge of the hilltop we looked away down into the village
and could see three or four lights twinkling, where there was sick folks, maybe; and the
stars over us was sparkling ever so fine; and down by the village was the river, a whole
mile broad, and awful still and grand. (Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn)
a. sad
b. cheerful
c. peaceful
d. excited
3. It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the outside of my
little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all night, and using the window for a
pocket-handkerchief. (Charles Dickens, Great Expectations)
a. gloomy
b. scary
c. happy
d. peaceful
4. And now the rosy blush of morn began to mantle in the east, and soon the rising sun,
emerging from amidst golden and purple clouds, shed his blithesome rays on the tin weathercocks of Communipaw. It was that delicious season of the year when Nature, breaking
from the chilling thraldom of old winter, like a blooming damsel from the tyranny of a sordid
old father, threw herself, blushing with ten thousand charms, into the arms of youthful
Spring.
(Washington Irving, Knickerbocker’s History of New York, Complete)
a. cheerful
b. scary
c. excited
d. pastoral
5. (A man arrives in a town in a blinding snowstorm.) He might have been in a deserted village. We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here, with
the bugles of the tempest pealing, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth. One viewed
Continued
Copyright © 2007 Taylor Associates/Communications, Inc.
ReadingPlus
Taylor Associates
®
Identifying Mood and Tone| L-1
COMPREHENSION SKILLS PRACTICE
Student Name_______________________________________________________________
the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice
which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, spacelost bulb.
(Stephen Crane, The Blue Hotel)
a. lonely
b. cheerful
c. peaceful
d. scary
6. In the following passage from Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain uses an extended metaphor to describe the Mississippi River. He refers to the river as a book. Read the passage
and then describe the mood, using the words and details Twain included.
The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a
dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me
without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered
them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for
it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles
there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could
leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you
could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful
a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparkingly renewed with every reperusal. The passenger who could
not read it was charmed with a peculiar sort of faint dimple on its surface (on the
rare occasions when he did not overlook it altogether); but to the pilot that was
an ITALICIZED passage; indeed, it was more than that, it was a legend of the
largest capitals, with a string of shouting exclamation points at the end of it; for
it meant that a wreck or a rock was buried there that could tear the life out of the
strongest vessel that ever floated. It is the faintest and simplest expression the
water ever makes, and the most hideous to a pilot’s eye. In truth, the passenger
who could not read this book saw nothing but all manner of pretty pictures in it
painted by the sun and shaded by the clouds, whereas to the trained eye these
were not pictures at all, but the grimmest and most dead-earnest of readingmatter.
Copyright © 2007 Taylor Associates/Communications, Inc.