Tone

Tone
Definition of Tone
Tone, in written composition, is an attitude of a writer toward a subject or an audience . Tone is generally conveyed through the choice of words, or the viewpoint of a writer on a particular subject.
Every written piece comprises a central theme or subject matter. The manner in which a writer approaches this theme and subject is the tone. The tone can be formal, informal, serious, comic, sarcastic, sad, or cheerful, or it may be any other existing attitude.

Examples of Tone in Literature
Tone has a significant place in literature as it manifests writers’ attitudes toward different subjects.

          Example #1: Catcher in the Rye (By J. D. Salinger)
Holden Caulfield, in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, unfolds his personality through the tone he adopts throughout the novel . Let us have a look at some of his remarks:
“All morons hate it when you call them a moron.”
“If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody.”
“Goddamn money. It always ends up making you blue as hell.”
“Catholics are always trying to find out if you’re Catholic.”
Holden’s tone is bitterly sarcastic as he criticizes the nature of things in real life. His character may reveal the attitude of the writer towards life, as it is common for writers to use their characters as their mouthpieces.
           
           Example #2: The School (By Donald Barthelme)
Observe the tone of a short story , The School , by Donald Barthelme:
“And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.”
The use of the adjectives “dead” and “depressing” sets a gloomy tone in the passage. As trees signify life here, their unexpected “death” from an unknown cause gives the above passage an unhappy and pessimistic tone.
         
          Example #3: The Road Not Taken (By Robert Frost)
Robert Frost, in the last stanza of his poem The Road Not Taken , gives us an insight into the effect of tone:
“I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
Frost tells us about his past with a “sigh,” this gives the above lines an unhappy tone. This tone leads us into thinking that the speaker in the poem had to make a difficult choice.

Function of Tone
Tone, in a piece of literature, decides how the readers read a literary piece, and how they should feel while they are reading it. It stimulates the readers to read a piece of literature as a serious, comical, spectacular, or distressing manner. In addition, tone lends shape and life to a piece of literature because it creates a mood. Moreover, tone bestows voice to characters, and throws light on the personalities and dispositions of characters that readers understand better.

Source:
https://literarydevices.net/tone/