Chapter 9-Style, Tone, and Irony
Style, tone, and irony are three of the major tools in an author’s toolkit to help the author convey their thoughts to you in the way they want you to hear them. These three elements can greatly change the way a work affects the reader.
Style is the distinctive way a writer arranges words to achieve particular effects. Everyone is familiar with style as far as clothing, furniture, or architecture. People have their favorite styles that create certain effects. Everyone has a style and writers do also. The way they arrange their words can be so distinctive, a reader can tell who wrote them even if the author’s name isn’t on it. The word “diction” refers to the writer’s choice of words. Some writers prefer to use large words that present a challenge for you, or they use more foreign words that most of us don’t know. Some of them prefer to use plain ordinary everyday language that’s easier to understand. That diction, their choice of words, is part of their style. Sentence structure is also part of style. Henry James, a late Victorian writer, wrote long, complicated sentences. The Turn of the Screw which we use in our Engl 101 here, uses quite complex sentences which readers might have to stop and sort out. Henry James prefers that style. Ernest Hemingway, on the other hand, writes noticeably short, to the point sentences because he was a journalist. Some people prefer Victorian, as I do, while some people prefer Hemingway, who is modern. Styles can be experimental; authors can try new things. Poets can shape their poems in certain ways. Writers of novels can use different points of view, different types of characters or they can write very traditionally, exactly the way the reader expects, but for a good writer, it will be distinctive. They will have a recognizable style.
Tone is the author’s attitude towards the people, places, and events in the story. The reader can usually tell if the author being sarcastic or upbeat, or gloomy. Do they seem disapproving or frustrated or sad? What’s the author’s attitude towards the story he’s telling? Don’t over-complicate it. Sometimes, the reader might need more than one reading as we’ve talked about with things like theme or symbolism, but generally, tone is something the reader can see fairly quickly. In Bartleby the Scrivener, the author shows a tone of interest and amazement that a character could act this way. The tone that comes across through the author and, just as in life, misreading the author’s tone could lead to misunderstanding the entire story. Sarcasm often causes misunderstandings. If the reader doesn’t realize the author is being sarcastic, he or she may not understand the tone of the story. The author could be disapproving about something in the story, but if you don’t realize the tone is disapproving, you may think they’re just telling you a story and that it’s all fine. When you go back and read it again, the disapproving tone becomes apparent. Usually, tone is pretty straightforward, but if you do misread the tone, the story becomes rather difficult to understand.
We hear people say “that’s ironic” all the time but do they know what “ironic” means? Sometimes the situation is not ironic at all; it’s just surprising. Irony is a literary device which reveals a reality different than what appears. Irony comes in three forms.
- Verbal irony-where a person says one thing and means something else. Sarcasm is verbal irony. Someone might say, “That’s just great!” when they mean the opposite.
- Situational irony is an incongruity between what we expect to happen and what actually happens. In The Story of an Hour, for instance, a woman believes her husband dead and when he comes back, instead of being happy, she dies. We don’t expect her reaction. It’s situational irony because what should have made her happy, made her so sad and upset that she actually died.
- Dramatic irony is a difference between what the characters know or say and what the reader knows. In the Shakespeare play Coriolanus, some of the Roman senators are applauding themselves on how neatly they’ve gotten rid of the general Coriolanus that they didn’t want in town. At that same moment, Coriolanus is at the gates of the city with an army, ready to conquer and subjugate the city. They are just so proud of themselves, but we know something they don’t, so that is dramatic irony. One of the favorite pieces of dramatic irony show on the movie poster from Jaws. The swimmer is just swimming along, having a good time, but underneath here, Jaws is waiting to eat her alive. That’s a great picture of dramatic irony.
