Guide Navigation
- Close Reading & Textual Analysis
- Close Analysis
- Openings
- Characters and Characterisation
- Setting, Places and Scenes
- Atmosphere, Mood, Tone and Foreshadowing
- Dialogue
- Description, Imagery, Figurative Language
- Irony
- Alternative Interpretations
- Narrative
- Verisimilitude
- Time
- Symbolism
- Context
- Genre
Introduction
The fifth in the Englishedu series on ‘frameworks’ for A Level English Literature, this guide explores and exemplifies ways of analysing aspects and uses of atmosphere, mood, tone and foreshadowing in novels, short stories or prose extracts in order to allow students access to the highest grades.
Atmosphere, mood, tone and foreshadowing: Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The most straightforward way of demonstrating how to closely analyse a text in terms of the theme above is to exemplify it. The extract below is followed by a series of bullet points which demonstrate how to analyse closely using carefully chosen quotations in a variety of ways. These bullet points also include commentaries which aim to explain how and why such sections have been analysed and what they could highlight within the main text, contextually and thematically.
There are, of course, many more things that could be said about each extract, but it’s hoped that it will prove useful in your initial teaching stages to model it using the examples and then to ask students to find other things that they could analyse themselves as well as to consider ‘alternative’ interpretations and to derive possible contextual aspects.
From Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The shore was fledged with palm trees. They stood or leaned or reclined against the light and their green feathers were a hundred feet up in the air. The ground beneath them was a bank covered with course grass, torn everywhere by the upheavals of fallen trees, scattered with decaying coco-nuts and the palm saplings. And always, almost visible, was the heat.
The sounds...
