What is the author's tone in the novel, All’s Well?

Awad makes choices with language and tone in All’s Well that illustrate defining character traits and help delineate between the novel’s main action and its persistent flights into nightmarish surreality. Miranda’s physical pain keeps her obsessively focused on her own body, whose agonizing decline then miraculous healing mirror her character’s emotional breakdown on the way to her eventual enlightened self-awareness. In the opening of the novel, the harsh tone of the lexicon that Miranda favors when regarding her “misshapen body” (5) and general state of “decrepitude “(15) that causes her to “hobble around like Richard III” (4) matches the tone of Miranda’s impressions of the “dubious college” where she is “dubiously employed “ in the “sad," “shabby,” “sorry excuse for a theater” (4). The bitterness, cynicism and self-loathing stemming from her career-ending fall that define Miranda’s character at the outset are evident in the language Awad associates with the character. Miranda’s general disdain for her “dull and untalented” (15) students and her “enemy”, the “nightmare” (8) Fauve can be interpreted as a defense mechanism Miranda uses to boost her own weak self-esteem.