Chapter 11: Study Project on Tone

Tone is like tone of voice.  We know what tone is by hearing what we read.  Tone is produced by a combination of the text's various elements, including style, character, narrator, point-of-view, and the ways knowledge is distributed within the text and between text and reader.

Occasionally the tone of a story may not be clear. Or a story may have several different tones.  Different tones provide different readings and interpretations of the story.

Identifying tone is a matter of looking at the following elements:

1. Word choice
2. Cues about how to understand the tone of dialogue
3. Cues about the narrator's tone
4. The distribution of knowledge

1.

Diction and Tone

Word choice, or diction, can help define a story's tone.   What words in the following passage help define tone?

My sister never met the hat-trick wife.  She was a hinter.  You know the type, the woman who warns you a hundred times a day in small unnoticeable ways that something is wrong?  She hints so much that your only recourse is to mistake her meaning.  When she came home and said, What did I want for dinner, pork?  Or just the fat?  I pretended she was being humorous.

What does is the narrator's tone?  What does the tone suggest about how the narrator feels about his wife?

2.

The Tone of Dialogue

Dialogue is often a large part of a story.  Written dialogue contributes to the tone of a story if only as a contrast to the narrator's tone.  The tone of dialogue, however, is often signaled either by what characters say, or cues about how they say it.

What are the characters' tones of voice in the following examples?

"This place had better turn up in a minute," Bailey said, "or I'm going to turn around."

"It would be very educational for them," the grandmother murmured.

"What's that got to do with me?" he asked brutally.

Well, you better quit gittin ‘ me riled up, else they'll be totin' you out sooner than you expect.  Ah'm so tired of you Ah don't know whut to do.  Gawd!  How Ah hates skinny wimmen!"

"Still as much fun as always," the ex-wife hinted.

What elements in these passages signal what the speaker's tone is?

3.

The Tone of Narration

While it is relatively easy to discern the tone of dialogue from the cues provided about context, style of speaking, and our understandings about how certain phrases sound, the tone of a narrator is more difficult.  As in section 1., above, narrator's tone is partly the product of word choice, but what other cues might contribute to our sense of a narrator's tone?

In the following passages, first identify tone, and then consider what elements in the passage work together to produce the tone.

The children began to yell and scream that they wanted to see the house with the secret panel.  John Wesley kicked the back of the front seat and June Star hung over her mother's shoulder and whined desperately into her ear that they never had any fun even on their vacation, that they could never do what THEY wanted to do.  The baby began to scream and John Wesley kicked the back of the seat so hard that his father could feel the blows in his kidney.

What is the narrator's tone in this passage?

What specific elements indicate tone?

Finally she grew quiet, and after that, coherent thought.  With this, stalked through her a cold, bloody rage.  Hours of this.  A period of introspection, a space of introspection, then a mixture of both.  Out of this awful calm.

What is the narrator's tone in this passage?

What specific elements indicate tone?

Gail borrows a glove for me from the other team and assigns me third baser, a position I want about as much as another divorce.  I'm no better at third base than I am at marriage or poker, preferring low-risk bets like catcher to the high stakes of double plays and charging grounders.

What is the narrator's tone in this passage?

What specific elements indicate tone?

In all of these passages, in what ways does tone help define character?

4.

Distribution of Knowledge

Who knows what can produce complex tone.  If, for example, the reader knows that a speaker means the opposite of what the speaker says, then we understand the speaker's tone to be ironic.  When readers know more than characters, we call the difference dramatic irony.  What we know can change the way we understand the tone of a passage.  For example:

Characterize the tone of the following passage:

         "Yes, and what would you do if this fellow, The Misfit, caught you?" the grandmother asked.

            "I'd smack his face," John Wesley said.

Is the tone different if you read the passage knowing that indeed The Misfit will catch him?  In what ways?

Try it again with this passage:

He hurried to the kitchen door, but hung outside there some minutes before he entered, and stood some minutes more inside before he closed it after him.

Is the tone different if you read the passage knowing that he thinks his wife is dead from snakebite inside?

Is the tone different if you read the passage knowing he thinks his wife is dead from snakebite inside, but that the snake is there waiting for him?

Putting It All Together

Tone is complex and difficult to separate from such other elements as stile, narrator, characterization, and imagery.  Despite its intangible quality, however, it is an important part of how we read texts and how we understand their various ironies and meanings.