comment on style / language

From the very first sentence, the tone of the novel is set as cold, aloof, and distanced from the highly charged emotional content of the story itself. The first sentence says all that really needs to be said about the tone and voice of the omniscient narrator: “The baby is dead” (1). There is no grief, no outpouring of emotion. There is simple statement of fact. Because the content of the sentence is so emotionally fraught, it clashes with the cold, sparse, laconic prose in order to create a tremendous amount of tension and increase the emotional response of the reader. Completely devoid of pathos, the prose forces the reader to feel emotion on behalf of the characters on their own, without the help of the narrator, who, it seems, is simply there to state facts and tell a story, without any thought spared for emotions or feelings.