How A Kitten Ate My Partner's Depression Tone Analysis

Tone The expression of the author’s attitude towards the piece of writing’s subject (and/or the audience) is called tone. Through different words and expressions, an author can convey a different tone towards the readers to express what the author wants them to feel. Different aspects can affect which type of tone an author chooses. They must know the purpose of what they are writing (what message they want to get across to the people reading) and who their audience is going to be (what the author wants them to take away from what they are going to read). In The New York Times article “How a Kitten Eased My Partner’s Depression” by Hannah Louise Poston, the author uses the tone of the first part of the writing as a juxtaposition for the final and overall tone of the article to accentuate her strong feelings towards the cat that helped her husband stray away from depression. In the beginning of Hannah’s article, she has a very depressing and gloomy tone to her writing. When speaking of her husband Joe’s depression, she would use terms like; “fog”, “burning”, “zombie-like”, and even the phrase “...tumble into the gray sinkhole...”. She establishes a sense of unhappiness in the reader, her tone expressing the

Instead of gloomily trying to help her husband and failing, Hannah decides to make choices to benefit herself. Her self-reliance tone starts when she states, “I started buying my own favorite flavor of ice cream instead of his.” and “...I did it secretly, rebellious and entirely for my own inarticulate reasons.” Versus the sense of melancholy and almost regretful tone for attempting to help before, this time the author’s attitude is pleased to be doing something for herself. She no longer tries to tend to her husband’s seemingly helplessness state of being, and now autonomously chooses to get what she feels she needs: a