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Style
Definition of Tone
The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical or mournful, praising or critical, and so on. For instance... read full definition
The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical or mournful, praising or critical... read full definition
The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical... read full definition
Key Examples in Absalom, Absalom!
Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis:
The tone of the novel is dark and ominous due to the strong and unavoidable sense of fate that seems to propel many characters to their doom in the turbulent years following the American Civil War as depicted by Faulkner. Miss Rosa's reflections upon her childhood in the first chapter of the novel reflect this tragic tone more generally:
“I was born twenty-two years too late—a child to whom out of the overheard talk of adults my own sister’s and my sister’s children’s faces had come to be like the faces in an ogre-tale between supper and bed long before I was old enough or big enough to be permitted to play with them, yet to whom that sister must have to turn at the last when she lay dying, with one of the children vanished and doomed to be a murderer and the other doomed to be a widow before she had even been a bride."
