Page 4 Setting

  Setting

Setting is an important story element.

It involves more than just a backdrop for the action in a story. 

Setting develops meaning through four key elements: 

1. place such as locale, buildings, and climate  
   
2. time such as the social, political, and historical era  
   
3. mood established by word choices and by the types of items described  
   
4. context or how time and place affect the characters in the story (Context sets the stage for behaviour and personality of the characters.)  

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Because setting often contributes to the identity of a character in a novel, in many stories, setting may be symbolic, as shown in the following chart.

Element of Setting	Possible Symbolic Representation
rivers, roads or trails	the journey of life
hills	conflicts, barriers or obstacles
season: spring	rebirth or rejuvenation
season: summer	maturity
season: fall	old age
season: winter	death
storms	turmoil
light and dark	good vs evil or innocence and experience

“There are dark shadows on the earth, but its lights are stronger in the contrast.” Dickens 

Literature can reveal and contribute to education.

• Events happening in a society are reflected in an author's work, especially in the setting. For example, an economic downturn or financial struggle may be indicated by characters picking through the garbage for food such as in Suzanne Collins' Hunger Games.
  
• Setting allows the reader to picture the issues authors describe and to sympathize with the victims. For example, Boy in The Striped Pajamas by John Boynes discusses the tragedy of Holocaust through a little boy living next to a concentration camp. Viewing someone else’s suffering allows us to put ourselves in another’s place and to solve the problems presented to the character.
  
• Furthermore, readers change society by entertaining and spreading the new ideas found in books. These ideas may be either positive or negative. Literature reflects the values of society or contributes to changing the values of society by changing people's minds. Literature has the ability to help society realize its mistakes or to affirm society in its mistakes and contribute to making them. Society is crucial to literature and the setting of novels.

  

 

Example 1: In Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens examines the abuse of hungry children.

Oliver is growing up in a setting that is “stagnant and filthy. The very rats, which here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were hideous with famine.” Oliver, desperate with hunger and holding an empty bowl asks, “Please, sir, I want some more.” Readers were so horrified by the descriptions in the novel that thirty years after the novel was published, England made changes to alleviate child suffering.

  

  

 

Example 2: In the same way, the novel Animal Farm examines the consequences of failing to protest justice.

It comments sarcastically on the Communist idea of economic equality, presenting it as a myth. The setting is a farm where the animals revolt against humans. The changes are led by pigs who tell the other, eventually less equal, animals, 

“Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty?” 
The novel comments, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”  

This contributes to the message that political figures and organizations who form revolutions to implement change will manipulate education, laws, and media to become worse than the previous leaders if they are not checked by the public. 

“I did mean [Animal Farm] to have a wider application....I meant the moral to be that revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses ... know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job (brought change).... There is no such thing as a benevolent dictatorship." – George Orwell 

The setting has resonated with many political refugees fleeing from dictatorships.

  

An important part of a novel’s journey is to remember what was important and why it was important – and to pass the memory on to others. A strong sense of place in the novel puts the reader in the middle of the narrator's memories. Therefore, details of setting are typically figurative, sensory, and accurate or plausible.