SKELLIG

 

 

The description of setting creates a curious and gloomy tone. The description of the grandfather’s house and the garage. For example, for the grandfather’s house: there is a sign with ‘DANGER’. This creates a curious tone to why it is dangerous. For the garage, the author creates the gloomy tone with this description: ‘It was more like a demolition site or rubbish dump or like one of those ancient warehouses…’. This makes the reader identify the atmosphere.

 

The atmosphere is created through the tone. Since the tone is curious and gloomy, this makes the atmosphere feel mysterious and gloomy. The description of the garage makes us feel it has a gloomy factor about it. While the grandfathers place, makes us feel curious about it thus creating a mysterious mood.

 

The author uses a technique to create the long lasting effect of the atmosphere and its gloominess: pathetic fallacy. Pathetic fallacy is a literature device which the author gives human emotions to an object or nature. The pathetic fallacy here is the winter. In this book, winter represents the misery of the family and the loneliness of Skellig at the start. The winter creates this long term atmospheric effect because this book is told whilst winter was ending and hence at the end, spring comes representing happiness and rebirth. This relates to all the characters in the book for they all have a happily ever after.