Mood and Tone: What’s the Difference?
Two ways in which authors communicate with readers is by the use of mood and tone.
Although both techniques can elicit particular emotions central to understanding a story,
the terms are easily confused.
Mood in literature is firmly rooted in the locale or setting of the story that reveals
the subject.
The physical atmosphere is built scene by scene to create a sense of time, place and
reality.
Is the world depicted familiar to the reader in its contemporary realism or is it fantastic
and reminiscent of the distant past?
How does everything look, smell and feel?
And, most importantly, what does each scene reveal about the subject at hand?
These are some of the questions we can ask to delve deeper into the mood emphasized in
each sequence of an unfolding story.
Tone, on the other hand, is less sensual play and more the attitude of the characters toward
the subject at hand.
It is strongly related to the narrator’s point of view, delivered most reliably through
choice of words, either explicitly or implicitly.
Tone certainly contributes to the mood of a story, but it is less about creating emotional
resonance within the readers and more about communicating the narrator’s thoughts or
state of mind.
Here is another way of understanding the difference between mood and tone: mood shows the subject
of the story while tone tells the reader what the characters think of that subject.
To illustrate, let’s look at two examples from literature from different eras that share
similar themes, DRACULA by Bram Stoker (that’s Dracula, if you didn’t catch it) and Interview
with a Vampire by Anne Rice.
Vampire literature is a genre in which mood and tone are almost as important as plot and
story, so the characters in each novel become conduits for communicating a unique other-worldly
atmosphere that can only exist through their perceptions.
Dracula is an epistolary novel in which the narration is delivered through a series of
journal entries.
The mood is set as the scene unfolds with the protagonist Jonathan Harker’s travel
from London, England to the Carpathian Mountains in TRANSYLANIA (that’s Transylvania) during
the late nineteenth century.
The mood first affected is one of disorientation, with the physical contrast drawn sharply between
Western and Eastern Europe by the reference to the literal bridges over the Danube leading
eastward.
Later, the contrast is accentuated as we follow the narrator further into this unfamiliar
realm by reading about his first meal, “paprika hendl” (it’s chicken), a dish drawn to
be distinct, presumably, from food familiar to the English palette at that time.
As in the opening, the mood continues to be shown with sight and taste, with the senses
directed toward an unfamiliar scene–and the subject of the novel.
To foreshadow the horror to come, the mood is punctuated with the narrator’s attitude
about that subject.
The tone is one of apprehension and fear as the narrator explicitly tells us about his
first night sleeping in a foreign hotel: “I did not sleep well…There was a dog howling
all night under my window” and “I had to drink up all the water” but “was still
very thirsty”--presumably from the strong, unfamiliar seasoning in the food served the
night before.
In this case, the protagonist’s tone matches the mood.
However, sometimes tone and mood are at odds with one another.
Interview with a Vampire begins quite literally with the viewpoint of the protagonist, the
vampire himself, who languidly opens the novel with, “I see…,” while preparing himself
for an interview with a young journalist.
His attitude, or tone, is one of quiet ease.
His tone matches the mood, which is set by a rather unexotic backdrop of a cityscape
through the window of an ordinary hotel room.
The dialogue bounces between vampire and journalist, monster and human, while the mood of prosaic
reality is revealed in the simple details of a chair, table and recording device.
The tonal horror necessary for the tension to unfold is projected by the very different
attitude of the journalist toward the scene: the readers are told that the interviewer
“shuddered” and “recoiled” with “cold sweat running down the side of his face.”
In other words, reason meets emotion in this clash between tone and mood.
A sharp contrast is drawn between the attitude of the two protagonists toward the scene,
and the audience is sucked right in.
(You know, because vampires, they suck blood.
THEY SUCK BLOOD!)
For the student of literature, such moments of tension are exciting and revelatory.
Mood shows the particular scenes that direct us toward the subject of a story, but tone
tells what each character actually thinks of that subject.
Both are necessary devices to make a world come alive on the page or on the screen.