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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
Chapter 3
Explanation and Analysis:
The narrator, Maya Angelou herself, speaks with both intellectual and religious tonality, stemming naturally from her bookish habits and rural Christian upbringing. In an example of this religious/poetic tone from Chapter 3, Angelou meditates on the characters and maturity of KKK members:
Boys? It seemed that youth had never happened to them. Boys? No, rather men who were covered with graves' dust and age without beauty or learning. The ugliness and rottenness of old abomination.
The poetic, religious speech utilized by Angelou in this passage undermines White supremacist rhetoric, which typically holds White people up as the intellectual and cultural superiors of Black people. Angelou turns this elitist and racist way of thinking on its head by using language one might expect out of the King James Version of the Bible, or a Keats poem (see "Ode on a Grecian Urn"). She effectively employs forms of language lauded as "culturally superior" to question the KKK's cultural superiority, revealing such racists to be "without beauty or learning."
Generally speaking, it is important to note that because this novel is a memoir, narrative tone and authorial tone are ostensibly the same thing. Whereas in most works of fiction, one cannot assume that the narrator's tone, opinions, or ideas reflect the author's own, one can assume that congruence for memoirs like I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Related Themes:
