Take a story's temperature by studying its tone. Is it hopeful? Cynical? Snarky? Playful?
Technical, Tenuous
No, we don’t mean technical like an Ikea diagram. We mean that you can basically learn how to camp and fish from this story. Here’s what we mean:
Nick tied the rope that served the tent for a ridge-pole to the trunk of one of the pine trees and pulled the tent up off the ground with the other end of the rope and tied it to the other pine. The tent hung on the rope like a canvas blanket on a clothesline. Nick poked a pole he had cut up under the back peak of the canvas and then made it a tent by pegging out the sides. He pegged the sides out taut and drove the pegs deep, hitting them down into the ground with the flat of the ax until the rope loops were buried and the canvas was drum tight. (I.25)
Phew! Seems like Nick knows just about as much about wilderness survival as Bear Grylls. But this is not an accident. Nick himself is super focused on the technical aspects of his tasks, everything from laying out his sleeping gear to pitching his tent to hanging up his pack to opening a can of food. Like we say in the “Symbols” section, by focusing on these individual tasks Nick is able to keep things in his control. When things happen that are beyond his control—namely, losing a particularly large trout or possibly trying to fish in the swamp—we see Nick reacting with anxiety.
This is where tenuousness comes in too (“tenuous” basically means fragile). Nick needs to keep all of these things under wraps, and because he’s so thorough and methodical with everything, we sense that his little world of control is actually quite fragile. At the very beginning of the story, we see that the mere movement of trout makes Nick tense; the things that cause Nick anxiety aren’t at all predictable. So while everything might seem neat and tidy and clear-cut (Nick camps, Nick fishes, end of story) it actually might bubble up at any given moment.