Read this excerpt from Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close . I knew I could never let Mom hear the messages, because protecting her is one of my most important raisons d’être , so what I did was I took Dad’s emergency money from on top of his dresser, and I went to the Radio Shack on Amsterdam. It was on a TV there that I saw that the first building had fallen. I bought the exact same phone and ran home and recorded our greeting from the first phone onto it. I wrapped up the old phone in the scarf that Grandma was never able to finish because of my privacy, and I put that in a grocery bag, and I put that in a box, and I put that in another box, and I put that under a bunch of stuff in my closet, like my jewelry workbench and albums of foreign currencies. Which word best describes the tone of this excerpt?
The narrator describes each step in a careful, organized sequence: buying an identical phone, copying the greeting, wrapping the old phone, and hiding it inside several containers. This deliberate, step-by-step presentation makes the tone methodical. Although the narrator is keeping a secret, the passage focuses more on the careful process than on deceit.
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