What is your first thought
when you read the title "Tiger Hunt"?
A prickly anticipation
of a dangerous adventure, stalking a fierce and scary, powerful
and frightening, incredibly beautiful creature, or do you picture
bouncy T I G G E R and Pooh heading out to look for honey? Maybe
your response is somewhere in between. Authors have distinctly
different tones in their writing too. Practice 1 and 2 will
give you a good example of differing tones on the same topic:
The Tiger Hunt!
Click on
the book link to the right to read the selection from "Mrs.
Packletide's Tiger," by the famous
storyteller, Saki.
Here are a few bits of background information to help you
dive into the passage:
Setting is India at the time England ruled India as a colony.
Mrs. Packletide is English. The villagers are Indian. The
rupee is a unit of money in India. Memsahib means "lady"
or "madam" for a European woman.
focus on what the author might be feeling about a tiger
hunt, requested and paid for by a woman who does not want
to take much risk, or exert herself very much
notice the sentences are really long, but you can get the
meaning if you take them apart and pause when there is punctuation
read them a second time and tell yourself what the sentence
is saying in your own words
enjoy the image of the villagers and the tiger
But first, just a quick question to focus the purpose for you
as you read.
Question:
The author probably
wrote this passage to:
Question:
In the first sentence
the reader is introduced to Mrs. Packletide, the villagers
and the tiger. The author's tone is respectful toward
the tiger when telling us the village is the, "favored
rendezvous of an animal of respectable antecedents."
What is the author's
reason for choosing the words "abandon" and "confine"
to describe the tiger's habit of not hunting game anymore,
but eating smaller domestic animals?
Yes
No
Maybe
Answers
A.
tone: disgusted
purpose: to show the tiger is too lazy to hunt big game
B.
tone: humorous
purpose: to show the village is a perfect setting for the memsahib
to hunt a tiger without risk
C.
tone: approving
purpose: to show the village made a place for the tiger to live
out his old age with ease
D.
tone: accepting but sad, resigned
purpose: to show that old age forced the tiger to give up his
natural instincts of hunting, to limit his food to smaller animals
Is your answer A, B, C or D? Check for the correct answer.
The overall tone of the author is humorous touched
with a note of mocking satire and sadness. This tiger hunt will
go off without a hitch of real adventure because the tiger can't
fight so there will be no risk to Mrs. Packletide. Here the
author is mocking the British colonials in India. The villagers
will be winners because they can earn some money, and Mrs. Packletide
won't even see through their set up. We catch the humorous situation.
The only loser is the tiger, a creature to be respected; and
so comes the sadness.
