Mood and tone play a significant role in the entire message and theme of a story or literary piece. It sets the emotion of the text towards the readers and allows them to create own perceptions about the content of the story. These elements create the main idea of the story making it interesting and worth reading. Mood is the atmosphere of the story and it is what the author's creative style of writing makes you feel something towards the story you're reading. It is also the overall feeling conveyed in the story. While tone is the author's attitude towards the subject or towards something. It also signifies the author's point of view. The tone can also change quickly or remains the same throughout the story.
The presence of tone and mood in the story help us identify the moral, theme and message of the story. We can easily determine the tone and mood by recognizing the settings, characters and conflict. From there, we can now understand the author's purpose of writing the kind of story and what does the story want the readers to know and learn at the same time.
Tone and mood are somehow similar because, for example, if the author's tone is glad and cheerful, it reflects the mood of the entire story. Another, we can also identify the tone and mood by its setting. Sometimes, the "dark night", "gloomy day" descriptive words in a setting signifies loneliness, revenge, fright, in grief or sorrow. In the same manner, places indicated in a setting like "cemetery", "abandoned house", "cave", "lake", "desert" also convey symbolic meaning that can lead us to the tone and mood of the story which can may be death, suicide, depression, isolation, etc. Even the attitudes or traits and intentions of the characters can determine the mood and tone of the story.
To better be able to identify the tone and mood of the story, it is very important to know the characters and their role or traits they play in the story as well as determining the settings or time that the story happened. Time frame like "Christmas Eve", Thanksgiving", "Independence Day" or years during World War can also set the tone and mood in the story.
