Voice, tone, and the rhetoric of narrative communication

Abstract

The essay argues for a rhetorical view of narrative communication as an author’s deployment of particular resources in order to generate certain responses in readers, and then examines the nature and possible functions of voice as a resource. It defines voice as the synthesis of style (diction and syntax), tone (a speaker’s attitude toward an utterance) and values (ideological and ethical), and then turns to analyzing the role of voice—and more particularly, the role of tone—in narrative communication. With George V Higgins’s The Friends of Eddie Coyle as Exhibit A, the essay examines the functions of voice and tone in fictional dialogue, and with Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking as Exhibit B, it examines their role in nonfictional narration. The essay concludes with a call for further analyses of voice and tone, even as it cautions that their roles may be more or less important as we move from one narrative to another.