What's the proper answer to this

The novel’s second sentence already indicates the bleakness of the world these protagonists inhabit: "Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before" (3). Throughout the novel, additional details of the landscape reinforce this bleak image of the protagonists' environment. "The blackness he woke to on those nights was sightless and impenetrable.... No sound but the wind in the bare and blackened trees" (13). The general mood that quickly permeates the book is one of death and desolation, and the plot bears this out.