Overview: Location, Location, Location
The setting of a story locates it in time or place. At times, the setting of a story can be so important that it is like another character. At other times, it is a backdrop to the action of the plot. The setting is not random, but deliberately chosen for essential clues to the story’s tone and theme.
Settings Can Drive the Story
The setting of a story is often essential to the plot. Ahab and the great white whale in Moby-Dick could only be in the ocean. Stories in The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury need the Red Planet as a backdrop. The African jungle is central to Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. In those stories, vivid description of the setting make the plot and characters come alive.
Even when the setting isn’t as crucial, the story cannot take part in an empty universe. Characters need a backdrop of scene for the plot to make sense. The setting made fade into the background, but details of time and space are still necessary. Readers of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries are not always aware of 221B Baker Street and its environs in London, but the setting is still there. If the details were very important to the plot, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought them to the foreground.
Settings Make the Tone Real
Some types of genres rely more heavily on settings, such as mysteries, thrillers, romantic stories, and science fiction. Exotic locations lend the air of escape to the everyday. Even when the setting is suburbia or Main Street, the setting provides clues to the tone of the story. Does it take place during the day, or at night? The rainy setting of Forks, Washington provides tone to the Twilight novels besides the connection with vampires abhorring sunny days.
Settings Provide Insight into Theme
The setting of Lord of the Flies on a remote island, away from civilization, is essential to William Golding’s commentary on how thin the veneer is of civilized behavior. The jungle, animals, oppressive heat, and wilderness contribute to the development of theme as much as do the actions of the characters. The bleak future in dystopian novels such as Fahrenheit 451, The Hunger Games, and Ammonite provides insight into themes of control in a totalitarian society.
Settings Tap into Universal Archetypes
Settings of stories tap into the universal struggle and conflict that people have within themselves. Moby-Dick is more than the struggle that Ahab has with the white whale. Set on a vast sea, it is ultimately the struggle and obsessions within Ahab that make reading Melville’s classic more than a story about whaling. Dr. Jekyll lives in a light-filled mansion, while Mr. Hyde is found in a dingy laboratory at the back of the same house.
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