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1、opinion about, and statement of, the theme. Moral inferences drawn from most stories: Moral inferences may be drawn from most stories, no 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 adv
2、ice for properly regarding and sympathizing the lonely, the uncertain, and the old. But obviously the story does not set forth a lesson that 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
3、 in Hemingways view of love, of communication between people, of dignity. Great stories, like great symphonies, frequently have more than 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 s
4、lavery and migratory labor respectively, this is to use theme in a larger and more abstract sense than it is in our discussion of Hemingways “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 c
5、oncern the theme of “initiation into maturity.” Such general descriptions of theme can be useful, especially if we want to sort a large number 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 th
6、e theme may be very different: the tone of treatment may be, for example, either comic or tragic, straightforward or ironic. The writers vision 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
7、 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 sentence. 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 a
8、bout 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 main 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 understa
9、nding after finishing reading the story?Does the author (through the narrator) make any general observations about life or human nature? Do 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 contai
10、n any especially curious objects, mysterious flat characters, significant animals, repeated names, special allusions, or whatever, that hint 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 st
11、atement of theme, have we cast our statement into general language, not just given a plot summary? Does our statement hold true for the story 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
12、 little daughter.” This is the opening sentences of “Golden Touch”, which introduces the time, place, and the usual mentality of the character. 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 i
13、s the background against which a character is depicted or an event narrated. Its purpose is to provide an imaginary link between what happens 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 pur
14、pose in different genres. The traditional way to tell a story reveals much about setting.Usually, a setting consists of time and place. It 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
15、of art. A setting may or may not be symbolic. Generally, a setting is more concerned with the physical aspects. Setting is closely related 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 ev
16、ent in the novel whereas exposition is only the initiating action.1. The elements making up a settingBy the setting of a story, we simply 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
17、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 suggests 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 geographica
18、l location, its topography, scenery, and such physical arrangements as the location of the windows and doors in a room; (2) the occupations 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 win
19、ter of the year; (4) the general environment of the characters, for example, religious, mental, moral, social, and emotional conditions through 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 me
20、re background. It can make things happen. It can prompt characters to act, bring them to realizations, or cause them to reveal their innermost 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:
21、 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 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.
22、 A sight of a green field dotted with fluttering daffodils affects us very differently from a sight of a dingy alley, a tropical jungle, or 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 sce
23、ne. We are depressed by a dingy alley, not only because it is ugly, but because it may arouse a feeling, perhaps sometimes unconsciously, 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 Con
24、rads Heart of Darkness, might involve a complicated analysis: the pleasure of the colours and forms of vegetation, the discomfort of humidity, 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 moo
25、d of Scotland. The English novelist Graham Greene apparently needed to visit a fresh scene in order to write a fresh novel. His ability to 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 Afric
26、a of that book replaced the true remembered West Africa of his own experience. Such power is not uncommon: the Yorkshire moors have been romanticized because Emily Bronte wrote of them in Wuthering Heights, and literary tourists have visited Stoke-on-Trent in northern England because it comprises th
27、e “Five Towns” of Arnold Bennets novels of the early twentieth century. Thus, a readers reaction to a place is not merely based upon the way it looks, but upon the potentialities of action suggested by it. Places matter greatly to many writers. For instance, the French novelist Balzac, before writin
28、g 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 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, unde
29、r whom the presentation of setting assumes an unusual importance. His “Wessex” villages cast intangibly such as spell upon the villagers that once they leave their hometowns they will inevitably suffer from disasters, and the farther they are away from their hometowns, the more, terrible their disas
30、ters 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 unfold. 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
31、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 vale 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
32、 departure from her native place that led to her tragedy. In The Return of the Native, the atmosphere of Egdon Heath prevails over the whole 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 re
33、pelled and rebel suffer disaster.Sometimes an environment serves as more than a mere place to set the story. Often, it is inextricably entangled with the protagonist, and even carries strong symbolic meanings. Cathy as an image of the feminine personality, for example, in Emily Brontes Wuthering Hei
34、ghts, is not supposed to possess the “wilderness” characteristic of masculinity and symbolized by the locales of Heathcliff and Wuthering 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 s
35、tart of the story, the narrator describes a colonial jailhouse: Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheeltrack of the street, 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
36、 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 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
37、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.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 wi
38、ld 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. In this artfully crafted novel, setting is intimately blended with characters, symbolism, and theme.In addition to place, setting may crucially involve the time of
39、 the storycentury, year, or even specific hour. It may matter greatly that a story takes places in the morning or at noon. The medieval background informs us differently from the twentieth century. Kennedy and Gioia note that in The Scarlet Letter, the nineteenth-century author Nathaniel Hawthrone,
40、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 the Puritan community of Boston of the earlier seventeenth century. This setting, to which Hawthorne pays so much attention, together with our schemata concernin
41、g Puritan practice, helps us understand what happens in the novel. We can understand to some extent the agitation in the town when a woman 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
42、of sin. Without information about the seventeenth-century Puritan background, a reader today may be perplexed at the novel. The fact that 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 suggestiv
43、e of the whole society, which is crucial to an essential understanding of The Scarlet Letter as a whole.Besides place and time, setting may 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 domi
44、nates, or when a piece of fiction is written largely to present the manners and customs of a locality, the writing is often called local color 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
45、 readers everywhere. Thomas Hardy, in his portrayal of life in Wessex, wrote regional novels. Arnold Bennetts novels of the “Five Towns” are markedly regional. Willliam Faulkner, known as a distinguished regional writer, almost always set his novels and stories in his native Mississippi.3. The setti
46、ng 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 fictiona
47、l gift in a novelist or storyteller. But whatever the setting of his/her work, a true novelist is concerned with making an environment credible for his/ her characters and their actions and in accord with the development of the plot.In some stories, a writer seems to draw a setting mainly to evoke a
48、tmosphere. In such a story, setting starts us feeling whatever the storyteller would have us feel. Thus atmosphere is a metaphor for a feeling or an impression which we cannot readily attach to some tangible cause. We say that an old farmhouse set among large maples, on a green lawn, has an atmosphe
49、re of peace. Here what we mean is that the house, by reason of the look of quietness and by reason of a number of pleasant associations we have with the kind of life lived there, stirs a certain reaction in us which we do not attach to any single incident or object, but generally to the whole scene. In the same way we may say that the setting of a story contributes to defining its atmosphere. For instance, in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” Poes setting the action in an old, dark, lantern-lit house greatly contributes to the rea
