The mood of The Emperor Jones is tense, haunting, and at times terrifying. The play follows Brutus Jones as he runs for his life, both literally and metaphorically, and the mood reflects this, quietly ratcheting up the tension with each scene as he devolves further into his terror. Over the course of the play, Jones is hunted by the specter of his past misdeeds as well as by Lem and the native islanders rebelling against his imperial rule. O’Neill uses the sound of the tom-tom drum to inspire fear in the audience; the drumbeat grows louder and more ominous with each passing scene, building to a deafening and terrible noise that thrums constantly in a crescendo overhead so that the characters and the audience become one in their alarm.
As Jones becomes more worn down (and he, in turn, becomes more human), the mood likewise grows desperate as he scrambles to keep hold of what little power and time he has left. With every new hallucination, Jones falls further into the grip of his memories, so that he cannot tell vision from reality. Although his movements while experiencing these hallucinations start off “mechanical,” the more desolate he becomes, the more immersed he grows in his visions, so that by Scene 6 “a shudder of terror shakes his whole body” and “his voice reaches the highest pitch of sorrow, of desolation.” Although Jones’s death means success for Lem and the natives who sought freedom from his imperial rule (at least temporarily), the mood of the play’s finale is not a happy one. The tragedy of Jones’s demise, coupled with Smithers’s concluding curse, results in a somber, disillusioned finale.
