The mood of “The Californian’s Tale” is simultaneously suspenseful and bleak. The following passage captures the bleak and depressing mood at the beginning of the story, with a hint of the hopeful suspense to come after the narrator meets Henry:
It was a lonesome land! Not a sound in all those peaceful expanses of grass and woods but the drowsy hum of insects; no glimpse of man or beast; nothing to keep up your spirits and make you glad to be alive. And so, at last, in the early part of the afternoon, when I caught sight of a human creature, I felt a most grateful uplift.
The depressing mood here comes across in descriptions of the setting as “lonesome,” with “not a sound,” “no glimpse of man or beast,” and “nothing to […] make you glad to be alive.” All of these descriptions combine to paint a bleak portrait of a mining community far past its heyday.
The note about the narrator feeling “a most grateful uplift” when catching “sight of a human creature” (Henry) introduces the start of the plot as well as a turn to a more hopeful mood. What begins as an optimistic mood quickly turns into a more uneasy and suspenseful one, as both Henry and the narrator become obsessively focused on the return of Henry’s wife. Once the narrator learns that Henry’s wife has been dead for 19 years and Henry only believes she will return because he has gone mad, the story shifts back into its original bleak and hopeless mood.
