Canvas essay In the short story, “The Greatest Gift” by Philip Van Doren Stern, the theme of trying to realize how much a person has, is portrayed through the authors use of characterization and tone. To start of with, the author not only talks about tone he also exposes the characterization throughout the story. In the beginning when he is about to jump he is explaining what the water would feel like and how it would look. “George wondered how long a man could stay alive in it. The glassy blackness had a strange, hypnotic effect on him. He leaned still further over the railing” (Van Doren Stern 1). When he writes, “how long a man could stay alive” he is indicating that he doesn’t want to stay alive very long. That he just wants to do …show more content…
This emphasizes that he is in a really dark place of mind. The scene that the author is writing is, dark, empty, and depressive. The sentence, “... to be swallowed up in the shadows under the bridge” highlights how he feels he is being swallowed up by these thoughts and the thoughts of jumping off where hiding in the shadows of himself. Not only that, but when the author writes, “... detached from the shore”, it displays that he feels that he is detached or different from the outside world. That he is different because of the thoughts he had. At this moment in the his life, he wasn’t thinking about all he had, he was only thinking about what he didn’t have or what he did wrong. But towards the end the tone changes, it changes to a more happy time, “After all, the place you grew up in was the one spot on earth where you could really feel at home” (Van Doren Stern 3). The tone of this is happier because it’s suggesting that he was starting to feel at home, and he wasn’t feeling as if he wasn’t worth it. The author demonstrates that once someone gets to the place that feels like home, life just feels