The mood of the novel is ambivalent. Johnson wants readers to take seriously the social problems that encourage someone like the "ex-colored man" to pass for white, but he also wants the reader to be dissatisfied with passing as a solution to racial inequity. The final paragraph of the novel, in Chapter 11, drives this ambivalence home:
My love for my children makes me glad that I am what I am, and keeps me from desiring to be otherwise; and yet, when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought, that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage.
The final line refers to the biblical story of Esau, who traded his birthright (as the firstborn son, he was destined to be the head of the household) for a bowl of stew. The story is a parable about the consequences of valuing material goods and comforts over the spiritual. The narrator uses the reference to capture the uncomfortable feeling that he was destined for something more. Although his passing might be advantageous for his children, who have access to wealth and social connections that might be unavailable to them if the world knew they were Black, he isn't sure the trade-off has been the right choice on the whole. His "birthright" is to be a Black man: he is supposed to be able to celebrate the successes of other Black men and have his successes counted among them. Instead, he has chosen the comfort and ease that comes when he cuts himself off from this community.
This ending is neither entirely happy nor entirely sad. It simply is. Johnson invites the reader to feel confused about the ethics of the narrator's choices and, by extension, to feel confused about the ethics of their own choices. The novel is addressed in large part to Johnson's white readers at the time. These same readers had the power to make small choices that would have made it a little easier for people like the narrator to live authentically.
