Lecture 18: Evoking Setting and Place in Fiction

Evoking Setting and Place in Fiction

Lecture 18

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very story has a setting, but setting is not equally important to all

stories. For some narratives, setting is a sort of painted theatrical

backdrop against which the story plays out, and that backdrop can

be changed for another one without fundamentally changing the story itself.

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what makes a novel or story memorable is the author’s careful evocation

of a particular place and time. In this lecture, we’ll talk about some of the

purposes to which setting can be put in a narrative and some of the ways in

which setting can be evoked.

Setting as a Metaphor

z In many narratives, setting can be a metaphor for the narrative as a

whole. One of the most famous examples here is the opening paragraph

of %OHDN +RXVH, Charles Dickens’s novel about a complicated and

never-ending lawsuit in mid-19th-century England.

o Before we meet a single character in %OHDN+RXVH and before

the plot even starts, Dickens indelibly evokes a vision of dark,

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people wheezing and shivering in the all-encompassing fog.

o This exceptionally vivid evocation of setting serves two

purposes: It vividly evokes the sensory details of London in

the mind of the reader—the darkness, the cold, the dirt—and it

makes the setting serve as a metaphor for the misty, insinuating,

impenetrably foggy coils of the lawsuit itself.

z In J. G. Farrell’s historical novel 7URXEOHV, which is about the Irish

rebellion against British rule in the years after World War I, the main

setting is a giant resort hotel on the Irish coast called the Majestic, and

it serves throughout the novel as a metaphor for the grand, ornate, and

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