Assignments

Chapter 9 - Tone and Theme

Igby Goes Down

Tone described: darkly humorous, hard-shelled with a deeply buried soft center 

Tone illustrated: The dark humor is apparent from the start when the brothers calmly discuss how to kill their mother. The hard-shell is apparent with the crosscutting between a) Igby having sex with Rachel, the mistress of DH, his godfather, and b) his mother’s forced decorum as she sips a martini, chatting with DH’s wife, DH being mom’s longtime lover. The soft center first appears when Igby quietly tells Sookie of his father’s breakdown. 

Theme: There is madness in families; some of us escape it, some don’t.    

A moment that illustrates the theme: Igby tears the head off his boyhood teddy bear so he can smuggle drugs inside the bear.