What are some examples of mood in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird?

Mood refers to the feelings writers evoke in their readers through word choices as well as through the setting and themes of the story. Since Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is realistic in the sense that it strives to portray everyday life as it normally is in Southern towns like the fictional Maycomb, Alabama, Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird also frequently shifts in mood. Furthermore, the novel frequently shifts in mood because it is a coming-of-age story that spans the life of two years of growing children. Regardless of shift in mood, a humorous mood is the most dominant mood since Lee creates characters with a sense of humor who are able to remain upbeat.

A humorous mood is the first mood captured in the first chapter and a mood Lee maintains throughout the book even surrounding moments that are darker in mood. Lee's humorous mood is especially captured in the narrator Scout's playful personality and sense of humor. Humor is especially captured in Scout's sense of irony. For example, Scout opens the book by referring to the moment Jem's arm was severely broken, a moment we learn about in detail by the end of the book. Though Scout begins the opening paragraph by describing the permanent affects of the injury, such as uneven arm lengths and a hand that no longer lays correctly against Jem's side as he walks, she ends the paragraph in a very nonchalant manner by saying, "[Jem] couldn't have cared less, so long as he could pass and punt" (Ch. 1). Scout's nonchalance and her ability to capture her brother's own nonchalance towards the situation helps convey the characters' senses of humor, which further shows that they have learned to view tragic moments with humor, and to paint the humorous mood that Harper Lee created to dominate the story, despite any sorrows or tragedies in the story.

Lee continues to create her humorous mood through Scout when she narrates the debate she and Jem had as an adult about what specific events led up to his arm being broken. Scout argued that "the Ewells started it," while Jem argued it started when he and Dill began trying to make Boo Radley come out of his home. Scout expresses her sense of humor by stating one could really connect the story of Jem's arm to the start of Finch history in Alabama, as we see in her following passage:

I said if he wanted to take a broad view of the thing, it really began with Andrew Jackson. If General Jackson hadn't run the Creeks up the creek, Simon Finch would never have paddled up the Alabama, and where would we be if he hadn't? (Ch. 1)

In this passage, Scout is using verbal irony to sarcastically tie the story of Jem's broken arm to General Andrew Jackson. In other words, Scout doesn't truly believe that one should take the story back that far and is expressing her belief sarcastically. Lee uses lots of verbal and other types of irony throughout the story to develop the humorous mood.