Hemmingway

Intro

Settings in these stories are extremely important.

Setting-locale time weather Summer night, 3rd day of summer vacation. 19. Setting is so much a part of the story.

So , the location of a story's actions, along with the time in which it occurs, is the setting. Every story would be another story, and unrecognizable if it took up its characters and plot and happened somewhere else... Fiction depends for its life on place. Place is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of, What happened? Who's here? Who's coming?..."

Ambiance is created by the author through setting. Sights, sounds, and, colors are all vividly painted in words. Often “a writer will seem to draw a setting mainly to evoke atmosphere” (p.118). Greasy Lake’s secluded, grimy, and polluted atmosphere embodies the behavior of the teenagers and “bad” characters that visit Greasy Lake to engage in sexual acts, drinking, fighting, and smoking pot. The story takes place at the dead of night to evoke an atmosphere of fear, suspense, and gloom. Amy Tan’s story includes two settings at different times. The first setting is of June May arriving in China and it is described as an unexpected “heat in October” (p. 136). China is also crowded, “And somehow the crowds don’t bother me” (p. 136). This brings out an atmosphere of chaos which the protagonist does not seem to mind. She is surrounded by family and gets a feeling of closeness, “Lili is lying next to me. The others are…sprawled out on the beds and floor” (p.140-141). An atmosphere of a close knit family in their home country where they are connected to the deep history and ethnicity is created. The next setting in the story is of her mother fleeing her town as the Japanese were invading. This setting gives the reader an atmosphere of a helpless mother escaping from the Japanese and her hurried attempt to save herself and her babies, “The roads were filled with people, everybody running and begging for rides from passing trucks” (p. 142). The war-torn setting evokes feelings of fright, urgency, and ravage. The atmosphere in both stories gives details to create an ambiance which helps to develop theme and characters in the stories.

Setting can add an important dimension of meaning by embodying the theme of the story. “Setting is closely bound with theme (what the story is saying)” (p.118). T.C. Boyle uses Greasy Lake at night as the setting to develop the theme of young hooligans’ coming of age and losing their innocence. In the beginning the protagonist and his friends were “all dangerous characters” (p.124), getting into a fight and attempting to rape a woman. When the boys must flee into the depths of Greasy Lake, the protagonist discovers a dead body; “I was nineteen, a mere child, an infant, and here in the space of five minutes I’d struck down one greasy character and blundered into the waterlogged carcass of a second” (p.128). Finding the dead body of in Greasy Lake lead to the protagonist’s loss of innocence for he comes to see that living a life of rebellion is a difficult life that could lead to death. An Alpine Meadow would not work as a setting because the idea of a meadow does not evoke the same feeling as Greasy Lake. An alpine meadow is pristine, beautiful, and unspoiled therefore is not grimy or dirty enough to convey the disgusting habits of the young boys. If the setting were an alpine meadow it would be unlikely the protagonist would blunder upon a dead body, since a dead body would probably be buried in a meadow. Amy Tan’s A Pair of Tickets has two settings. Tan uses China during World War II as the setting for her theme of mother’s undying love for her children. The setting of a war torn country is important because the protagonist’s mother must make an instantaneous, quick decision to give up her twins in hopes of saving their lives and her own. All her life she clings to the idea that her children are alive and okay. Her mother was unable to look for her daughters, after World War II the Iron Curtain prevented any communication between American and Chinese citizens, but as years passed “letters could openly be exchanged between China and the United States…. she immediately wrote to old friends.” Though a mother’s love for her children is a universal theme, the story would not work in a country like Peru. A Peruvian mother would not be faced with the instantaneous decision making apparent in a war-torn refugee country. Also there would not be the isolation preventing the mother from connecting to her children. Tan also uses present day China as the setting for the theme of an American-Chinese woman understanding “what it means to be Chinese” (p.133). The protagonist, brought up as American woman, goes back to China, after her mother’s death, to connect