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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
Chapter 4: The Departure
Explanation and Analysis:
The tone of Watership Down is anthropological; the narrator speaks about the rabbits as anthropologists might speak about a population they have just encountered (this carries both neutral and negative connotations at times—the narrator will occasionally display primitivist thought).
Note the following example of this anthropological tone from Chapter 4:
Rabbits, of course, have no idea of precise time or of punctuality. In this respect they are much the same as primitive people, who often take several days over assembling for some purpose and then several more to get started. Before such people can act together, a kind of telepathic feeling has to flow through them and ripen to the point when they all know that they are ready to begin.
What might, in another context, be interpreted as racist primitivism ultimately takes on a different quality in the above passage—because, of course, the narrator isn't speaking about people, but rather speaking about anthropomorphized rabbits (though the very use of the phrase "primitive people" does suggest a certain biased worldview). As a result, the observational, generalizing tone in this passage doesn't have the same offensive quality that many anthropological texts have. On the whole, the tone comes to seem authoritative and also curious about how these anthropomorphized rabbits behave, especially since this behavior is perhaps intended to shed light on human behavior.
