Identifying Tone in Difficult Passages
For each of the texts, do the following:
1) Identify the subject of the piece—the exact topic the writer is addressing.
2) Determine whether the tone of the piece is more positive, negative, or neutral.
3) Observe the DIFs. For each text, identify and label examples of Diction, Imagery
(including figurative language), and Facts that contribute to the writer’s intended tones.
4) From your observations of the DIFs, pinpoint two specific tones the writer has created
in the text (ex: “formal and didactic” or “comical yet bitter”)
1) In this excerpt from his autobiographical novel, Dave Eggers’s mother is nearing the end of a
long battle with stomach cancer. For the past few months, she has been immobile, living almost
exclusively on the couch of the family room.
While reclining on the couch most of the day and night, on her back, my mom turns her head to
watch television and turns it back to spit up green fluid into a plastic receptacle. The plastic
receptacle is new. For many weeks she had been spitting the green fluid into a towel, not the
same towel, but a rotation of towels, one of which she would keep on her chest. But the towel on
her chest, my sister Beth and I found after a short while, was not such a good place to spit the
green fluid, because, as it turned out, the green fluid smelled awful, much more pungent an
aroma than one might expect. (One expects some sort of odor, sure, but this.) And so the green
fluid could not be left there, festering and then petrifying on the terry-cloth towels. (Because the
green fluid hardened to a crust on the terry-cloth towels, they were almost impossible to clean.
So the green-fluid towels were one-use only, and even if you used every corner of the towels,
folding and turning, turning and folding, they would only last a few days each, and the supply
was running short, even after we plundered the bathrooms, closets, the garage.) So finally Beth
procured, and our mother began to spit the green fluid into, a small plastic container which
looked makeshift, like a piece of an air-conditioning unit, but had been provided by the hospital
and was as far as we knew designed for people who do a lot of spitting up of green fluid. It's a
molded plastic receptacle, cream-colored, in the shape of a half-moon, which can be kept handy
and spit into. It can be cupped around the mouth of a reclining person, just under the chin, in a
way that allows the depositor of green bodily fluids to either raise one's head to spit directly into
it, or to simply let the fluid dribble down, over his or her chin, and then into the receptacle
waiting below. It was a great find, the half-moon plastic receptacle.
~ excerpt from Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
2) Somebody dumped some tea into Boston Harbor. Somebody else hung some lights in a church
steeple. Paul Revere went riding around the countryside at midnight. Jefferson penned the
Declaration. There were a few battles and a rough winter at Valley Forge. But George
Washington kicked out the British. That’s the sum of the impression many people keep of the
American Revolution. It was not that simple or easy.
~ excerpt from Kenneth C. Davis’s Don’t Know Much About History
3) Babies, babies, babies. There's a plague of babies. Too many rabbits or elephants or mustangs or
swans brings out the myxomatosis, the culling guns, the sterility drugs, the scientific brigade of
egg smashers. Other species can 'strain their environments' or 'overrun their range' or clash with
their human 'neighbours', but human babies are always welcome at life's banquet. Welcome,
Welcome, Welcome—Live Long and Consume! You can't draw the line when it comes to babies
because . . . where are you going to draw the line? Consider having none or one and be sure to
stop after two the organization Zero Population Growth suggests politely. Can barely hear them
what with all the babies squalling. Hundreds of them popping out every minute. Ninety-seven
million of them each year. While legions of other biological life forms go extinct (or, in the
creepy phrase of ecologists, 'wink out'), human life bustles self-importantly on. Those babies just
keep coming! They've gone way beyond being 'God's gift'; they've become entitlements.
Everyone's having babies, even women who can't have babies, particularly women who can't
have babies—they're the ones who sweep fashionably along the corridors of consumerism with
their double-wide strollers, stuffed with twins and triplets. (Women push those things with the
effrontery of someone piloting a bulldozer, which strollers uncannily bring to mind.)
~ excerpt from Joy Williams’s “The Case Against Babies”
4)
I belong to that classification of people known as wives. I am A Wife. And, not altogether
incidentally, I am a mother.
Not too long ago a male friend of mine appeared on the scene fresh from a recent divorce. He
had one child, who is, of course, with his ex-wife. He is obviously looking for another wife. As I
thought about him while I was ironing one evening, it suddenly occurred to me that I, too, would
like to have a wife. Why do I want a wife?
I would like to go back to school so that I can become economically independent, support
myself, and, if need be, support those dependent upon me. I want a wife who will work and send
me to school. And while I am going to school, I want a wife to take care of my children. I want a
wife to keep track of the children's doctor and dentist appointments. And to keep track of mine,
too. I want a wife to make sure my children eat properly and are kept clean. I want a wife who
will wash the children's clothes and keep them mended. I want a wife who is a good nurturant
attendant to my children, who arranges for their schooling, makes sure that they have an
adequate social life with their peers, takes them to the park, the zoo, etc. I want a wife who takes
care of the children when they are sick, a wife who arranges to be around when the children need
special care, because, of course, I cannot miss classes at school. My wife must arrange to lose
time at work and not lose the job. It may mean a small cut in my wife's income from time to
time, but I guess I can tolerate that. Needless to say, my wife will arrange and pay for the care of
the children while my wife is working.
~ excerpt from Judy Brady’s “I Want a Wife”
5)
…Rahm made beauty with his whole body; it was pure pattern, and you could watch it
happen. The plane moved every way a line can move, and it controlled three dimensions, so the
line carved massive and subtle slits in the air like sculptures. The plane looped the loop, seeming
to arch its back like a gymnast; it stalled, dropped, and spun out of it climbing; it spiraled and
knifed west on one side’s wings and back east on another; it turned cartwheels, which must be
physically impossible; it played with its own line like a cat with yarn. How did the pilot know
where in the air he was? If he got lost, the ground would swat him.
Rahm did everything his plan could do: tailspins, four-point rolls, flat spins, figure 8’s,
snap rolls, and hammerheads. He did pirouettes on the plane’s tail. The other pilots could do
these stunts, too, skillfully, one at a time. But Rahm used the plane inexhaustibly, like a brush
marking thin air.
He was pure energy and naked spirit. I have thought about it for years. Rahm’s line
unrolled in time. Like music, it split the building rim of the future along is seam. It pried out the
present. We watchers waited for the split-second curve of beauty in the present to reveal itself.
The human pilot, Dave Rahm, worked in the cockpit right at the plane’s nose; his very body tore
into the future for us and reeled it down upon us like a curling peel.
Like any fine artist, he controlled the tension of the audience’s longing. You desired,
unwittingly, a certain kind of roll or climb, or a return to a certain portion of the air, and he
fulfilled your hope, slantingly, like a poet, or evaded it until you thought you would burst, and
then fulfilled it surprisingly, so you gasped and cried out.
The oddest, most exhilarating and exhausting thing was this: he never quit. The music
had no periods, no rests or endings; the poetry’s beautiful sentence never ended; the line had no
finish; the sculptured forms piled overhead, one into another without surcease. Who could
breathe, in a world where rhythm itself had no periods?
~ excerpt from Annie Dillard’s “The Stunt Pilot”
6)
Before we go any further, let’s acknowledge that the questions of whether and how
different kinds of animals feel pain, and of whether and why it might be justifiable to inflict pain
on them in order to eat them, turn out to be extremely complex and difficult. And comparative
neuroanatomy is only part of the problem. Since pain is a totally subjective mental experience,
we do not have direct access to anyone or anything’s pain but our own; and even just the
principles by which we can infer that others experience pain and have a legitimate interest in not
feeling pain involve hard-core philosophy—metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, ethics. The
fact that even the most highly evolved nonhuman mammals can’t use language to communicate
with us about their subjective mental experience is only the first layer of additional complication
in trying to extend our reasoning about pain and morality to animals. And everything gets
progressively more abstract and convolved as we move farther and farther out from the higher-
type mammals into cattle and swine and dogs and cats and rodents, and then birds and fish, and
finally invertebrates like lobsters.
The more important point here, though, is that the whole animal-cruelty-and-eating issue
is not just complex, it’s also uncomfortable. It is, at any rate, uncomfortable for me, and for just
about everyone I know who enjoys a variety of foods and yet does not want to see herself as
cruel or unfeeling. As far as I can tell, my own main way of dealing with this conflict has been to
avoid thinking about the whole unpleasant thing. I should add that it appears to me unlikely that
many readers of gourmet wish to think hard about it, either, or to be queried about the morality
of their eating habits in the pages of a culinary monthly. Since, however, the assigned subject of
this article is what it was like to attend the 2003 [Maine Lobster Festival], and thus to spend
several days in the midst of a great mass of Americans all eating lobster, and thus to be more or
less impelled to think hard about lobster and the experience of buying and eating lobster, it turns
out that there is no honest way to avoid certain moral questions.
~ excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s “Consider the Lobster”
7)
I have always disliked being a man. The whole idea of manhood in America is pitiful, in
my opinion. This version of masculinity is a little like having to wear an ill-fitting coat for one's
entire life (by contrast, I imagine femininity to be an oppressive sense of nakedness). Even the
expression "Be a man!" strikes me as insulting and abusive. It means: Be stupid, be unfeeling,
obedient, soldierly and stop thinking. Man means "manly"—how can one think about men
without considering the terrible ambition of manliness? And yet it is part of every man's life. It is
a hideous and crippling lie; it not only insists on difference and connives at superiority, it is also
by its very nature destructive—emotionally damaging and socially harmful.
The youth who is subverted, as most are, into believing in the masculine ideal is
effectively separated from women and he spends the rest of his life finding women a riddle and a
nuisance. Of course, there is a female version of this male affliction. It begins with mothers
encouraging little girls to say (to other adults) "Do you like my new dress?" In a sense, little girls
are traditionally urged to please adults with a kind of coquettishness, while boys are enjoined to
behave like monkeys towards each other. The nine-year-old coquette proceeds to become
womanish in a subtle power game in which she learns to be sexually indispensable, socially
decorative and always alert to a man's sense of inadequacy.
~ excerpt from Paul Theroux’s “Being a Man”