Take a story's temperature by studying its tone. Is it hopeful? Cynical? Snarky? Playful?
Intimate
Oftentimes, thanks to the omniscient narrator, we're inside Delia's head and have a front row seat to her thoughts, feelings and emotions:
Too late for everything except her little home. She had built it for her old days, and planted one by one the trees and flowers there. It was lovely to her, lovely. (25)
Geez. How can we not feel connected to this woman after reading something like that?
If Hurston is smiling down at us from the literary heavens above, she's probably wagging a pen at us right now and saying, "Exactly! Feel for Delia, feel for her!"
There's a reason the intimate, cozy and confessional tone is used only with Delia—it makes us sympathize with her and, heck, maybe even understand her situation.
Suspenseful
By the end of the first page, our stomachs already tighten in anticipation:
Just then something long, round, limp and black fell upon her shoulders and slithered to the floor beside her. (3)
We can't help but wonder—what is going on? And what is going to happen between Delia and Sykes?
After being planted early on, the mere idea of a snake becomes a tool of suspense and Hurston doesn't disappoint us. The final scenes in "Sweat," in which Sykes is trapped alone with the serpent, shakes us to the core:
The rattling ceased for a moment as he stood paralyzed. He waited. It seemed that the snake waited also. (102)
With masterful prose like this, we bet Hurston and Stephen King could have been good buddies had they lived during the same period.