“Berenice” begins with a tone of defeated, all-encompassing, forlorn desolation, as Egeaus (the story’s narrator) reflects on the state of the world:
Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform […]. Overreaching the wide horizon as the rainbow!
These first few lines are characteristic of the story’s tone, demonstrating the narrator’s belief in his own powerlessness. A sense of fatality is established through the use of precise language, as the scale of the narrator’s claims grows larger with each statement, so that misery becomes a grand thing unto itself, taking on an almost supernatural quality rather than a mere controllable human emotion. Furthermore, by claiming from the outset that the world is a place of unending misery, Poe hints at the inevitability of the story’s conclusion.
As Egaeus reminisces about his and Berenice’s youth, the tone shifts slightly into a wistful lamentation:
Yet differently we grew—I, ill of health, and buried in gloom—she, agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy; hers, the ramble on the hill-side—mine the studies of the cloister; I, living within my own heart, and addicted, body and soul, to the most intense and painful meditation—she, roaming carelessly through life, with no thought of the shadows in her path.
In this passage, Egaeus flits back and forth between remembering his own childhood and that of his cousin’s. His focus on instances that reveal their starkly different upbringings (despite growing up in the same home) hints that Egaeus may bear some hidden resentment and jealousy (and possibly even desire) towards Berenice. The contrast of her “carelessly” youthful energy and his intense, painful isolation provides necessary context to his later obsessive fixation on her ill health and deterioration.
As Egaeus succumbs further into his own mental illness, the tone of the story becomes more frenzied, mirroring his state of mind:
I held [Berenice’s teeth] in every light. I turned them in every attitude. I surveyed their characteristics. I dwelt upon their peculiarities. I pondered upon their conformation. I mused upon the alteration in their nature.
Here, Egaeus’s sentences become short and abrupt. His focus is so wholly devoted to the study of Berenice’s teeth that his language and syntax cannot rise to the level of their previous formality. By the end of the story, Egaeus devolves so far that he becomes totally depersonalized, and the tone likewise expresses his detachment from his physical sense of self. For example, he cannot recognize that the hand “indented with the impress of human nails” is his own, and neither can he acknowledge that the objects that fall out of the box on his table are Berenice’s teeth—only referring to them as “ivory-looking substances.” Egaeus’s total mental dissolution is a tragic end for a once-great scholar, and a terrifying note to end the story on.
