Mood. Mood, or atmosphere, is the emotion created in the reader by part or all of a literary work. As you read this piece, think about the mood it creates.
Point of View. Point of view is the vantage point from which a story, whether fiction or nonfiction, is told. A story may be told from the first-person point of view by one of the participants, who uses I to refer to herself or himself, or from the third-person point of view by an outsider who avoids the use of I. Pay attention to the point of view used by the author of this selection.
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The Very Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies, or the Relation, as it is sometimes called, exposed the grievous behavior of Spanish explorers in the New World. The excerpt included here focuses on Spanish actions at Hispaniola. Hispaniola, an island in the Caribbean Sea, is thought to be one of Christopher Columbus’s first landing sites. Certainly, it is where he began his first colonies. The island, which is now divided between the countries of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, was occupied by the Arawak. While the first exchanges between Columbus and the Arawak were relatively friendly, this situation soon changed. Columbus’s later voyages, and the voyages of the explorers who followed him over the years, produced savage treatment of the native people. In combination with European diseases against which the native people had no resistance, Spanish cruelty killed most of the native people of the Caribbean Islands. There are no pure Arawaks living in the Caribbean today.
What makes one person stand up against injustice when others are afraid to voice their opinions?
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