An analysis on style and tone of Lewis Carroll’s through the looking-glass

ABSTRACT

Style and Tone are the elements of fiction. Style is said as the writer’s language to perform his or her work. The role of style in a work of fiction is an important and complex one. Each writer has different style and tone in his or her work. Writers have the way to use language, select and arrange words to say what they want to say. On the other hand, they also have attitude toward the subject matters, characters, or audience.

Style encompasses elements such as word choice, syntax, sentence length and structure, and the presence, frequency, and prominence of imagery and figures of speech. Word choice and sentence structure help to create a tone, which may be intimate or distant, bitter or affectionate, straightforward or cautious supportive or critical, respectful or condescending.

Tone is a writer’s attitude toward his or her subject matter and reader that include humorous, nostalgic, affectionate, serious, melancholy, sarcastic, elated, and angry condition. Furthermore, tone is the narrator’s predominant attitude toward subject, whether the subject is place, event, character, or idea.

This study is aimed at answering the following two research problems. The first is what kinds of style are used in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking- Glass? The second is what kinds of tone are resulted from Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass? The objectives of this study are based on two items of two research problems. First of all is to identify the kinds of style used in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The second is to identify the kinds of tone resulted from the style of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass.

The research design used in this study is literary criticism. By using literary criticism, the researcher wants to make an evaluation in form of analysis the work, to explain the researcher interpretation of the work, or to provide readers with other relevant information. Further, this research uses structuralism because the researcher analyzes the intrinsic aspect of the novel.

The result of this study shows that the style which is used in the Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass in the matter of diction is formal and it is also combined between denotation and connotation. The writer applies lots of imagery that includes simile and personification that become a part of figurative language. In syntax, the writer tends to use paratactic style and most of sentences include simple sentence. The tone of the story is the middle tone since the writer presents an accurate picture of things as they are to the readers and the story doesn’t show about tragic, satiric, sentimental and other.