1、summing up the plot. A theme is usually stated in general words. Another try sounds like this: “Solitary people need a orderly place where they can drink with dignity.” That is a little better. We have indicated that Hemingways story is more than merely about an old man and two waiters. We remember
2、that at the end the story is entirely confined to the older waiters thoughts and perceptions. How do we understand his mediation on “nada,” nothingness, which bears so much emphasis? No good statement of the theme of the story can leave it out. Then we have still another try: “Solitary people need a
3、 place of refuge from their terrible awareness that their life (or perhaps, human life) is essentially meaningless.” Neither this nor any other statement of the storys theme is unarguably appropriate, but the statement at least touches one primary idea that Hemingway seems to be driving at. After we
4、 read “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” we feel that there is such a theme, a unifying vision, even though we cannot reduce it to a tag and we may still vary in our opinion about, and statement of, the theme. Moral inferences drawn from most stories: Moral inferences may be drawn from most stories, no
5、doubt, even when an author does not intend his/her story to be read this way. In “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”, we feel that Hemingway is indirectly giving us advice for properly regarding and sympathizing the lonely, the uncertain, and the old. But obviously the story does not set forth a lesson th
6、at we are supposed to put into practice. We can say for sure that “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” contains several themes and other statements could be made to take in Hemingways view of love, of communication between people, of dignity. Great stories, like great symphonies, frequently have more than
7、one theme. When we say that the title of Pride and Prejudice conveys the theme of the novel or that Uncle Toms Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath treat the themes of slavery and migratory labor respectively, this is to use theme in a larger and more abstract sense than it is in our discussion of Hemingwa
8、ys “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place.” In this larger sense it is relatively easy to say that Mark Twains Huckleberry Finn, Updikes A & P, and Faulkners Barn Burning concern the theme of “initiation into maturity.” Such general descriptions of theme can be useful, especially if we want to sort a large nu
9、mber of stories and novels into rough categories, but the fact that they are similar in theme does not mean that they mean the same thing. The attitude towards the theme may be very different: the tone of treatment may be, for example, either comic or tragic, straightforward or ironic. The writers v
10、ision of life is the special underlying fact of a story, and a theme, abstractly stated, is not the same thing as a vision of life. And we suggest anyway that, in the beginning, you look for whatever truth or insight you think the writer of a story intends to reveal. Try to state a theme in a senten
11、ce. By doing so, we will find ourselves looking closely at the story. Kennedy and Gioia make a helpful suggestion to consider the following points when we think about the theme of a story:Look back once more at the title of the story. What does it indicate in relation to the whole story?Does the mai
12、n character in any way change in the story? Does this character arrive at any eventual realization or understanding? Are you left with any realization or understanding after finishing reading the story?Does the author (through the narrator) make any general observations about life or human nature? D
13、o the characters make any (Caution: Characters now and again will utter opinions with which the reader is not necessarily supposed to agree.)Does the story contain any especially curious objects, mysterious flat characters, significant animals, repeated names, special allusions, or whatever, that hi
14、nt towards meanings larger than such things ordinarily have? In literary stories, such symbols or metaphors may point to central themes.When we have worked our statement of theme, have we cast our statement into general language, not just given a plot summary? Does our statement hold true for the st
15、ory as a whole, not just part of it?Chapter Four Setting“Once upon a time there lived a king named Midas in Phrygia. He loved gold more than anything else but his little daughter.” This is the opening sentences of “Golden Touch”, which introduces the time, place, and the usual mentality of the chara
16、cter. What is setting?An event occurs and a character exists in a particular time and place. This particular time and place is referred to as setting. A setting is the background against which a character is depicted or an event narrated. Its purpose is to provide an imaginary link between what happ
17、ens in the novel and what the reader takes to be reality. Like some other elements, setting is not peculiar to the novel. The reader finds it serving the same purpose in different genres. The traditional way to tell a story reveals much about setting.Usually, a setting consists of time and place. It
18、 can also mean circumstances such as Midass mentality. A setting may be detailed or sketchy. It depends on the novelists purpose of writing and his idea of works of art. A setting may or may not be symbolic. Generally, a setting is more concerned with the physical aspects. Setting is closely related
19、 with exposition in that they both help to make possible the events in the novel. In fact, an exposition must have a setting. But setting goes along with every event in the novel whereas exposition is only the initiating action.1. The elements making up a settingBy the setting of a story, we simply
20、mean its place and time, the physical, and sometimes spiritual, background against which the action of a narrative takes place. Every a story as short as the one at the beginning of the introduction must be set in a certain place and time: we have an “old, shuttered house” and the present tense sugg
21、ests time (though the present tense indicates much more than time itself in the story). The elements making up a setting are generally: (1) the actual geographical location, its topography, scenery, and such physical arrangements as the location of the windows and doors in a room; (2) the occupation
22、s and daily manner of living of the characters; (3) the time or period in which the action takes place, for example, the late eighteenth century in history or winter of the year; (4) the general environment of the characters, for example, religious, mental, moral, social, and emotional conditions th
23、rough which characters in the story move. (Holman and Harman, A Handbook to literature, 1986) But often, in an effective story, setting may figure as more than mere background. It can make things happen. It can prompt characters to act, bring them to realizations, or cause them to reveal their inner
24、most natures, as we shall see in John Cheevers short story “The Swimmer”.First, as we have said, the idea of setting includes the physical environment of a story: a region, a landscape, a city, a village, a street, a housea particular place or a series of places where a story occurs. (Where a story
25、takes place is sometimes called its locale.) Places in fiction not only provide a location for an action or an event of the story but also provoke feelings in us. A sight of a green field dotted with fluttering daffodils affects us very differently from a sight of a dingy alley, a tropical jungle, o
26、r a small house crowded with furniture. In addition to a sense of beauty or ugliness, we usually build up certain associations when we put ourselves in such a scene. We are depressed by a dingy alley, not only because it is ugly, but because it may arouse a feeling, perhaps sometimes unconsciously,
27、of poverty, misery, violence, viciousness, and the struggles of human beings who have to live under such conditions. A tropical jungle, for example, in Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness, might involve a complicated analysis: the pleasure of the colours and forms of vegetation, the discomfort of humid
28、ity, heat, and insects, a sense of mystery, horror, etc. The popularity of Sir Walter Scotts “Waverley” novels is due in part to their evocation of a romantic mood of Scotland. The English novelist Graham Greene apparently needed to visit a fresh scene in order to write a fresh novel. His ability to
29、 encapsulate the essence of an exotic setting in a single book is exemplified in The Heart of the Matter; his contemporary Evelyn Waugh stated that the West Africa of that book replaced the true remembered West Africa of his own experience. Such power is not uncommon: the Yorkshire moors have been r
30、omanticized because Emily Bronte wrote of them in Wuthering Heights, and literary tourists have visited Stoke-on-Trent in northern England because it comprises the “Five Towns” of Arnold Bennets novels of the early twentieth century. Thus, a readers reaction to a place is not merely based upon the w
31、ay it looks, but upon the potentialities of action suggested by it. Places matter greatly to many writers. For instance, the French novelist Balzac, before writing a story set in a town, he would go and visit that town, select a few lanes and houses, and describes them in detail, down to their very
32、smells. In his view the place in which an event occurs was of equal moment with the event itself, and it has a part to play. Another example is Thomas Hardy, under whom the presentation of setting assumes an unusual importance. His “Wessex” villages cast intangibly such as spell upon the villagers t
33、hat once they leave their hometowns they will inevitably suffer from disasters, and the farther they are away from their hometowns, the more, terrible their disasters will be. For example, in the Tess of the DUrbervilles, the Vale of Blakemore was the place where Tess was born and her life was to un
34、fold. Every contour of the surrounding hills was as personal to her as that of her relatives faces; she loved the place and was loved in the place. The vale, far from the madding crowd of the civilized city, was as serene and pure as the inhabitants. Tess, imbued deeply with the natural hue of the v
35、ale and bound closely to this world of simplicity and seclusion, experienced her own delight and happiness though her family was poor. It was, to some extent, her departure from her native place that led to her tragedy. In The Return of the Native, the atmosphere of Egdon Heath prevails over the who
36、le book; as an environment, it absorbs some and repels others of the characters: those who are absorbed achieve a somber integration with it, but those who are repelled and rebel suffer disaster.Sometimes an environment serves as more than a mere place to set the story. Often, it is inextricably ent
37、angled with the protagonist, and even carries strong symbolic meanings. Cathy as an image of the feminine personality, for example, in Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights, is not supposed to possess the “wilderness” characteristic of masculinity and symbolized by the locales of Heathcliff and Wuthering
38、Heights. In some fiction, setting is closely bound with theme. In The Scarlet Letter, even small details afford powerful hints at the theme of the story. At the start of the story, the narrator describes a colonial jailhouse: Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheeltrack of the street,
39、 was a grass-plot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, apple-peru, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had so early borne the black flower of civilized society, a prison. But, on one side of the portal, and rooted almost at the threshold, was a
40、 wild rosebush, covered, in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the condemned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be kind to him.
41、Apparently, the author makes a contrast between the ugly jailhouse with a tangled grass-plot overgrown with burdock and pigweed and something as beautiful as a wild rose. As the story unfolds, he will further suggest that secret sin and a pretty child may go together like a pigweed and wild roses. I
42、n this artfully crafted novel, setting is intimately blended with characters, symbolism, and theme.In addition to place, setting may crucially involve the time of the storycentury, year, or even specific hour. It may matter greatly that a story takes places in the morning or at noon. The medieval ba
43、ckground informs us differently from the twentieth century. Kennedy and Gioia note that in The Scarlet Letter, the nineteenth-century author Nathaniel Hawthrone, utilizes a long introduction and a vivid description of the scene at a prison door to inform us that the events in the story took place in
44、 the Puritan community of Boston of the earlier seventeenth century. This setting, to which Hawthorne pays so much attention, together with our schemata concerning Puritan practice, helps us understand what happens in the novel. We can understand to some extent the agitation in the town when a woman
45、 is accused of adultery, for adultery was a flagrant defiance of church for the God-fearing New England Puritan community, and an illegitimate child was evidence of sin. Without information about the seventeenth-century Puritan background, a reader today may be perplexed at the novel. The fact that
46、the story in Hawthornes novel took place in a time remote from our own leads us to expect different attitudes and customs of the characters, is strongly suggestive of the whole society, which is crucial to an essential understanding of The Scarlet Letter as a whole.Besides place and time, setting ma
47、y also include the weather, which, indeed, may be crucial in some stories. 2. Local color writing /regionalism and the writer, a regional writer.When setting dominates, or when a piece of fiction is written largely to present the manners and customs of a locality, the writing is often called local c
48、olor writing or regionalism and the writer, a regional writer.A regional writer usually sets his/her stories in one geographic area and tries to bring it alive to readers everywhere. Thomas Hardy, in his portrayal of life in Wessex, wrote regional novels. Arnold Bennetts novels of the “Five Towns” a
49、re markedly regional. Willliam Faulkner, known as a distinguished regional writer, almost always set his novels and stories in his native Mississippi.3. The setting of a novel is not always drawn from a real-life locale.The setting of a novel is not always drawn from a real-life locale. Literary artists sometimes prefer to create the totality of their fictionthe setting as well as characters and their actions.The creation of setting can be a magical fictional gift in a novelist or storyteller. But whatever the setting
