Sharon Flake Critique

Setting explores the main idea of disempowerment and isolation and aptly allows the audience to contrast it with the life of the main character. From the story, we are told that the setting is in a newsagency shop in a country town near a harbour. We are also told that the country town has a smelly harbour breeze. By using the country town as the setting, the author has placed us as readers to imagine isolation and places being far away, making it easier to convey ideas of the story. The isolation of the country town illustrates the life of the main character. She is isolated and stuck in the shop and town where she has no power to leave due to her parents. For example, “Once a day the big Greyhound rolled past going north to the city” and “Sometimes she would bicycle out to the edge of town and look along the highways”. Using the word city, the author is creating an atmosphere of adventure and the highway creates a sense of belonging. Through setting, the author is able to covey the main idea of isolation and disempowerment effectively and letting us as readers connect the relationship between the setting and the main character’s life.

Every story has a setting. Whether it is in this world or one that is completely imaginary, the setting of any story is necessary in order to understand the characters. The characters in the following three short stories are shaped by their setting and would not be the same if the setting was different. Over the course of each story it is easy to see how vital the setting is in order for the reader to fully understand the characters and their lives. Therefore, while the reader reads these stories they must analyze how the setting affects the characters, the obstacles that the setting creates, and what it tells us about the characters.

The story’s set in a now a days city, we can tell this by the use of cell phones and walking next to bridges “The walking path next to the highway passed under a bridge.” (Kleeman) “I was calling you over and over on the cell phone…”(Kleeman) The social environment at the time of end of the world wasn’t chaotic like what we see in movies. It started with people freaking out then after a few weeks settling down and accepting the fact that there was nothing we can do to stop it, you just have to make the time you have left worth it. This setting adds to the story by giving the reader an image that would be different then what they might have thought the end of the world would look like. The setting also adds to the conflict of the story. With the conflict being everything seems to be disappearing, literally the setting disappears as we read through out the story. The setting adds suspense to the story, keeping the reader on the edge of there seat wondering what was going to disappear next. The writer shows uses a great form of imagery to get the reader to understand the true emptiness of the setting this story is placed in “Sound carried further these days, tearing through the thin air like stone thrown as hard as you can toward the sea.”. The author puts the setting together perfectly to allow the reader to put themselves into the environment of the story. Which is so important because “the setting provides the framework for what is being discussed.”

The story takes place in a neighborhood that i estimate is quite small considering Carolee knows her neighbors are gone. The setting revolves around Carolee’s home. Her doing her chores in her home and the suspect roaming around outside. The setting influences the story a lot because it influences Carolee’s reaction to what happened. She had never seen anything like that in person and it opened her eyes to how society really is.

The settings reflect the character as a mirror. When the young man is among other people on the populated streets he is in control and appears as a very ordinary young man who is in love. But when he moves further on and the surroundings become darker, he becomes different and

• What are the ways in which each major character experiences conflict (either with self, with other characters, or with the social and/or physical environment)?

A conflicts occurs when she engages in this change because of her uncomfortableness with structure. While experimenting her new lifestyle, she goes to a room with all the walls are white and decides to live there; the white walls a demonstrate a fresh new start, which is exactly what she intends to do. Godwins states "She tried these personalities on like costumes, then discarded them." (Godwin 41) When she has to play the new role, she starts to feel captured and has to conform to the structure of the new character. Once she arrives at the point, she gets rid off the role and goes on to the next. A feminist would view this character a lost person in search of empowerment. She wants a life she is in control but does not want to conform to a structured lifestyle which can possibly lead her to the destruction of her and her family.

One of the ways the setting is so impactful throughout the book is it shows the decay of a city and country through an awful winter. The setting is so important during this book because it adds to the challenge that both Lev and Kolya face. A scene that really demonstrates the utter atrocity and discrepancy of the setting in the book is when they find the young boy at the chicken coop. During which, they see the boy cold and dying of starvation. One of the most powerful quotes in the book is, “The fierce souls who survived winter after winter in Siberia possessed something I did not, great faith in some splendid destiny, whether God’s kingdom or justice or the distant promise of revenge. Or maybe they were so beaten down, they became nothing more than animals on their hind legs, working at their masters’ command …. and dreaming of nothing but the end.” (Benioff, 34) This brings perspective to the reader and shows them the hardships that people faced each day. Lastly, the most important characteristic of the setting in the book, were the morose people of Leningrad. The reason why the people are so important to the setting of this book is because they add a depth of detail that cannot be described by the landscape of Leningrad itself. The people’s suffering is represented strongly in one quote, “You have never been so hungry; you have never been so cold, when we slept, if we slept, we dreamed of the feasts we had carelessly eaten seven months earlier.” (Benioff, 1) This quote shows how the people suffer and how remiss they were about the food they had available months before. Another powerful example of how desperate people were, was when you hear of them eating paper mixed with glue just to fill themselves up, or even saw dust. The setting in this book adds a tremendous amount of detail, (Active Voice) and

The social climate in the play is very grim. No matter where you are in the play there are always characters who are suffering. This may be understood as the people in the play are representing the Indian Americans who lived on reservations all over America, and most of them went through suffering. Another social climate is the desire to escape there current situation. Eddie does not want to leave his sister alone, but he is tired of living on the reservation that he would rather be dead. Aunt Thelma tells Eddie how life could have been better if she could have escaped, and had a chance at an education. Mike dreams of leaving and being taken care of by his aunt. Even Katherine dreams of leaving the reservation to find a better place for her kids. There were many other social climates such as pain, depression, destructive habits, and lack of role models. There are no real role models in this play that the kids can look up to. Even Aunt Thelma has lost her child, so it is not the best example to live by.

It is what makes this story “work” in our heads. If it were not for these aspects in the book then the reader would not know what Mulligan is intending for the reader to read about and understand and we would not know much about whom the characters are and what they look like. Setting descriptions help the reader understand poverty and children living in third world countries as it will help the reader experience almost physically, all the five senses or just some of them. Some examples of these aspects are when Mulligan expresses Behala as “rubbish town”, when Mulligan describes Rat (Jun-Jun), his family and where he lives. He expresses Jun-Jun by using the phrase; “he was the only kid in Behala that had no family at all” and “Kids used to call Rat, Monkey Boy before Rat because of his face does have that wide-eyed staring starring look that little monkeys have.” He talks about his home using the phrase “In his hole”. The last example of poverty is the scene with Raphael and the police. Mulligan uses the phrase from Raphael’s perspective, “I was too scared to breathe”.

Even though both John Freeman “Beirut” and Philip Appleman “Nobody Dies in Spring” poems use setting as camera to pull the reader closer to the main action and setting as action to describe how the setting of Beirut and New York has changed in springtime, they still differ significantly on their use of setting as mood. While Freeman has chosen setting expresses a sad and dark emotional reaction, Appleman set his setting in a way that creates a mood of happiness and full of life.

Though the viewers focus first on the centered figures, it is easier to first analyze the surrounding settings to understand them. The stone wall foreground and the open fields of the background each embodies one of the girl’s thoughts. The back landscape is filled with warm, airy colors of blue and orange, as if it were under a bright sun. On the other hand, the foreground’s stone walls and concrete floor has dark, cold, shadowy, earthy colors that seem to appear as if under a stormy cloud. The sunny land suggests free, pure, spacious land previous to the industrialization. Yet, the darkened foreground due to the overcasting shadows resemble the currently dirty,

Often times, settings aid in setting a tone for a piece of writing. In "Rough Road Ahead: Do Not Exceed Posted Speed Limit" by Joe Kurmaskie, the setting is able to instill varying emotions into the author. The desolate desert that Kurmaskie is trapped in elicits feelings of hopelessness and debilitation. After trusting someone for directions, he has gotten lost; which has led into severe dehydration, desperation, and exhaustion. Throughout Kurmaskie's period of weakness, he was also furious due to the misdirection. The further Kurmaskie traveled into nothingness, the worse his feelings and physical state would progress.

185). The conflict arises when his persona undergoes a change and loses its strength since he becomes an immigrant in a country that does not value him as much as he expects. At this point, other three parts of his psyche starts to reveal his unrevealed emotions such as fear, violence and depression.

One of the most important elements of this story is the setting. Taking place in the drug-plagued, poverty-stricken, and frustrated streets of Harlem in the 1950s, the setting