Chapter 8

“I stared at the mountain rising over me. Empty. It was a pointless thing to have done – climb up it, across it, and down it. Stupid! It looked perfect; so clean and untouched, and we had changed nothing, It was beautiful, immaculate, but it left me empty. I had been on it too long, and it had taken everything.”

Simon personifies the mountain by saying that it had taken everything from him. He says that the mountain is immaculate, perfect and beautiful and that they had defaced it by climbing it, and in return, it had taken Joe.

The tone of the passage is somber, the emphasis on Simon being empty, he almost wants to forget about the events over the last week, trying his best not to look back at the thing that took everything from him creates a dark tone.

“It was a lonely place to rest. In the huge chaos of the moraines, I had sat down to rest at the one spot where I would be reminded. We and sat in the same spot six days earlier. All our keen excitement and the healthy strong feel in our bodies had become an empty memory.”

The mood of the passage is set by the word lonely. Simon was thinking back when he and Joe were at the same location just six days earlier, it made him feel alone, isolated, making the mood negative.

The tone of the passage is sorrowful, Simon is almost mourning the loss of Joe. He feels alone and lost, using the words empty and chaos to describe his thoughts and perceptions.

One Reply to “Chapter 8”

  1. A good understanding of tone and mood overall and you have discussed in part, how these ideas are created. It would be good for you to go slightly further to explain the author’s purpose for the language selection. I.e. What do certain words/phrases indicate will happen in the text? What is the reader meant to feel or think from the language selection?

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