Tone

"Thinking back now, I can see we were just at that age when we knew a few things about ourselves---about who we were, how we were different form our guardians, from the people outside----but hadn't yet understood what any of that meant. " (37)

              In my understanding of that Novel the tone is nostalgic and often somber. Even when Kathy recalls something joyful, like at the first mention of the Sales. She herself does not get that excited, but instead recalls how the juniors below her would get excited. During her flash backs, Kathy is partly trying to better understand the events of her life that she did not fully grasp back then. Often times she will offer outside explanation of an event that she did not understand, pulling the reader out of her nostalgia for clarity of the event. So, in this excerpt she explains just how little she knew about herself. She explains that the Guardians told her vague details about who she was and what her true propose on this earth was. However, they planned when they told her, so that she would not piece the vague information together.
              This makes me wonder just how much the students actually knew. Also, I wonder how much the students at other "schools" knew. They had to be told more because they had guards that treated them as inhuman. Wouldn't they know why they were being subjected to this treatment?