Tone and mood are two of the most crucial tools that writers use to shape how a reader experiences a story or poem. Tone refers to how the narrator or speaker feels about what is happening. Mood refers to what the reader feels while reading. When an author explores existential themes these tools become very important. Existential themes ask big questions about human existence, about meaning or the absence of meaning, about isolation, mortality and freedom.
In the works students are reading this week namely The Tell Tale Heart and The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe the tone and the mood intensify the existential questions embedded in them. The following sections examine how tone and mood work in those works and how other works also explore similar themes.
The Tell Tale Heart by Poe
In The Tell Tale Heart the narrator insists on their sanity yet describes in detail their obsession with the old man’s “vulture eye” which leads to murder. The tone in this story is agitated and defensive. The narrator wants the reader to believe they are rational but what is described suggests otherwise. The mood becomes oppressive paranoid and full of guilt.
The narrator’s hearing of the old man’s heart beating under the floorboards is not only horror but expresses existential collapse. It shows that guilt cannot remain hidden. It undermines identity and self perception. The existential question emerges: what happens when conscience no longer allows a self to deny wrongdoing? The story forces the reader to feel the breakdown of the distinction between sanity and madness.
The Raven by Poe
In The Raven the speaker grieves over Lenore. At first the tone is mournful melancholic then comes a turn toward hopeless desperation as the raven repeats “Nevermore.” The mood begins with sorrow and longing then grows darker intense and finally bleak.
This poem deals with loss and the search for meaning after loss. The speaker seeks comfort answers hope but the poem returns only silence or that single word “Nevermore.” The existential theme lies in confronting loss that seems permanent and facing that nothing outside might fill the void. The poem presents death grief isolation and the collapse of hope.
Other Works that Explore Existential Themes through Tone and Mood
To deepen understanding it helps to look at other works that use tone and mood to explore existential questions more broadly.
Franz Kafka The Metamorphosis
In The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka the protagonist Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into an insect. The narrative tone is matter of fact detached. It does not explain or soften the horror of the transformation. The mood is disquieting alienated and surreal.
The transformation isolates Gregor physically and emotionally from his family and from society. Gregor loses what defined him his job his daily routines his human relationships. Existential themes emerge in the absurdity of the change the loss of identity and in the unbridgeable gap between Gregor and others. Life becomes meaningless from Gregor’s perspective because everything familiar vanishes. This work is often cited as an early example of existential literature.
Albert Camus The Stranger
The Stranger by Albert Camus features Meursault who is emotionally detached and emotionally flat in many situations such as at his mother’s funeral. The narrative tone is cool blunt and at times indifferent. The mood becomes one of alienation of absurdity of disconnection.
Meursault’s indifference to social norms to expressions of grief to moral expectations raises the question of whether meaning in life depends on social structure or inner conviction. Facing his own trial and death he moves toward recognition that life may have no higher purpose beyond one’s own choices. His confrontation with mortality and meaninglessness makes this work a classic existential text.
Sylvia Plath “Tulips” and The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath’s poetry and prose often explore themes of identity loss suffering and the self in crisis. In the poem “Tulips” the speaker lies in a hospital and tries to avoid all human concern. The tone is detached subdued then becomes uneasy as the tulips intrude. The mood shifts from calm emptiness to discomfort and guilt.
In her novel The Bell Jar the mood throughout is one of suffocation alienation inward collapse. The tone is intimate painful introspective. Esther Greenwood feels pressure from society expectations but also feels trapped by them. The existential anxiety in her struggle arises from the gulf between what she expects from life or what society expects and what she feels she is internally.
How Tone and Mood Serve Existential Themes
Tone conveys the manner in which the speaker or narrator regards what is happening. When that tone is detached or confused or desperate it aligns closely with existential concerns. Mood draws the reader into an emotional space in which they can feel uncertainty dread isolation grief guilt or freedom or despair. Those emotions are inseparable from existential questions because existence itself contains uncertainty mortality and the possibility that life lacks fixed meaning.
In the Poe works tone and mood combine to leave the reader unsettled not by action alone but by what is implied: that guilt may never let one rest that loss may be permanent that identity is fragile. In Kafka the sense of alienation comes from loss of social identity wholly. In Camus from emotional detachment and confrontation with the absurd. In Plath the internal voice reveals how one may feel estranged from the self and the world.
Conclusion
Tone and mood are more than literary devices for atmosphere or style. When authors focus on existential themes they become central. They let readers feel what it might be like to confront meaninglessness to suffer grief to exist with guilt or isolation or indifference. The works of Poe Kafka Camus Plath among others show that existential literature asks how it feels to be human when everything one relies upon may fail. Students reading The Tell Tale Heart and The Raven will gain insight not only on horror or tragedy but on what human existence demands when one lives without certainty or consolation.
Works Cited
Camus Albert. The Stranger. Vintage Books 1982.
Flight, Creative. (2023). Creative Flight, Vol. 4, No. 2, Academic Section.
Kafka Franz. The Metamorphosis. Penguin Classics 2005.
Poe Edgar Allan. The Tell Tale Heart in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Vintage Books 1975.
Poe Edgar Allan. The Raven in The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Vintage Books 1975.
Plath Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2006.
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