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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
Tone
Explanation and Analysis:
The tone of “In Another Country” is primarily disaffected and emotionally distant. The unnamed American narrator describes a series of upsetting events over the course of the story (being wounded in World War I, having little community or hope while rehabilitating in a hospital in Milan, witnessing one of his fellow wounded soldiers lose his wife), yet the man seems unable to feel the weight of these experiences or to sufficiently grieve.
This emotionally removed tone is, of course, intentional on Hemingway’s part. This is one of the subtle ways that he communicates how traumatized the narrator is from his time serving in the war (so traumatized that he has cut off his emotions). Hemingway has the narrator explicitly draw a connection between experiencing the brutality of war and becoming emotionally “detached,” as seen in the following passage (in which the narrator describes a wounded Italian soldier he gets to know in Milan):
The tall boy with a very pale face who was to be a lawyer had been a lieutenant of Arditi and had three medals of the sort we each had only one of. He had lived a very long time with death and was a little detached. We were all a little detached, and there was nothing that held us together except that we met every afternoon at the hospital.
Here, the narrator acknowledges that one of the soldiers he meets (who served in an elite force in the Italian army) “lived a long time with death” and was therefore “a little detached,” and, beyond this, that the narrator himself and the other wounded soldiers with whom he spends time “were all a little detached.” This is Hemingway’s way of helping readers to draw a connection between the tone of the story and the trauma that these men have endured.
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