Tone vs. Mood in Literature: What’s the Difference?

In literary analysis, tone is an author's attitude toward their subject matter. The author's tone in a literary work can reflect their personal opinion, or the tone can channel the feelings of a particular character. Authors convey tone through their word choice, punctuation, and sentence structure.

Much as your tone of voice can express emotions, so too can your tone in writing. You might write a story with a tone that is hopeful or bleak, romantic or cynical. When describing an author’s tone in a novel, short story, or essay, you might use any of the following tone words in your analysis: sarcastic, solemn, fatalistic, nostalgic, dramatic, ardent, sullen, light-hearted or cheerful.

While tone signifies an author's point of view, the mood of a piece of writing is the atmosphere of a piece and the overall feeling it conveys to the reader. While Charles Dickens’s tone may be ironic, cynical, and clever in novels like Bleak House and Hard Times, but the mood he creates for his readers is dreary and intriguing. Authors convey mood through figurative language and literary devices, letting the reader feel whatever mood the writing evokes.

Nearly all the words useful for describing tone can also function as mood words: Longing, nostalgia, terror, passion, and excitement all qualify as moods as well as tones. Just as a character in a story can speak in a wrathful or indignant tone, a reader can experience an angry mood when reading about that character. The character's tone translates to the reader's mood via specific dialogue, facial expressions, and other descriptors. In the short story "The Pit and the Pendulum," for example, Edgar Allen Poe masterfully uses his character's sense of dread to inspire similar dread in the reader.

However, a reader's mood does not have to match the tone expressed by an author, narrator, or character. For instance, in a horror novel, the main characters may be having a sleepover in a dark room. They might be enjoying themselves, and the passage may be written in a flippant tone, but thanks to the setting, genre, context clues, and details, the reader will pick up on a notably more sinister vibe. This means the reader experiences a fright-filled mood long before the characters in the story do.

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