por What is the setting of a story?
He atmosphere of a story It is the place where the action of the story takes place and where the characters meet. It is the space where the story takes place, and it can be a room in a house, a country or an imaginary place, like another planet.
It is one of the elements of the narration, and it has the function of complementing the actions and characteristics that involve the characters, so that they can get to know each other better and are credible.
The story, because it is a short narrative text, usually abbreviates the descriptions of the setting and the characters, although the reader manages to broadly understand the characteristics of the characters and the setting in which it takes place.
For its part, the novel, being a more extensive narrative text, allows the narrator to detail more precisely the characteristics of the environment, the temperament of the characters, the emotions and sensations at a specific moment in the story, etc.
It is worth specifying that the environment must be accompanied by a temporality that contextualizes the actions in order to know if what is being told occurs in an ancient or current moment, if it occurs during the day or at night, during a few days, in a certain season of the year, etc All of this is called the narrative framework.
Types of setting of a story
The setting is the place where the story takes place. However, it does not always have to be physical or material, but can be of other types or a combination of these.
It is very important that the environment is related to the plot and the characters to give the story greater credibility and unite all the elements that intervene in the story.
There are three basic types of environment, not mutually exclusive, that are part of the narrative atmosphere, that is, everything that surrounds the story and the characters from an emotional, physical, and cultural point of view.
The types of environment are physical, psychological and sociocultural. All three help create the atmosphere to give the story verisimilitude and encourage reader participation, that is, they believe what they are reading.
The types of environment are:
1. Physical environment
It is the space where the story unfolds and the characters come together. Usually, these open or closed environments can seem very real, even if they don’t exist in real life.
For example, a city, the countryside, the sea, etc. The extension of the narrative text will allow it to be extended or not in the description of the physical environment.
To better understand this point, let us take the case of The three Little Pigsancient folk tale that comes from the oral tradition.
The story begins by telling that the three little pigs lived outdoors and near the forest where a wolf lived that frequently threatened to eat them.
That is all the description they offer of the space, and the recipient of the story must then imagine the details of an environment with those parameters.
Whereas in The little Princeby Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the story takes place in different environments, such as the Sahara desert, asteroids and other planets, but there is an abundance of descriptions of the type of soil, the climate in each of them, whether it is daytime or night, how far or how close they were from planet Earth, etc.
2. Psychological environment
It is the spiritual atmosphere that surrounds the characters and the action. In other words, it is the emotional and intimate environment that the characters experience, the result of psychological approaches such as love, anger, revenge, fear, etc.
Horror stories play a lot with this type of environment to convey to the reader the suspense, the feeling of fear and expectation, etc.
In the story The ugly Duckling, by Hans Christian Andersen, it is said that the events take place on a farm, but they extend a little further into the ridicule that the other birds made to the ugly duckling, the sadness he felt, the rejection of everyone, his escapes from various places, abandonment, misunderstanding, etc.
From the previous case, we understand that the author emphasized the emotional picture that occurred inside the ugly duckling, rather than in the physical environment where it was.
In the case of the novel The Lord of the ringsFrodo, one of the main characters, comes from a small, quiet and secluded country which has shaped Frodo’s temperament of being docile, kind, simple and collected.
On his mission to destroy the One Ring, Frodo must go through different places where he faces problems that are synchronized with his mood and emotions.
Finally, he arrives in Mordor, a dead, evil, and dangerous place, where exhaustion and ordeals have definitively transformed the character’s psyche.
Hence, the psychological environment is not stable, by definition, but rather changes with the actions and the story to account for the transformations of the characters.
3. Sociocultural environment
It is the social condition in which the action takes place, taking into account the cultural, economic, religious level and social class to which the characters in the narrative belong.
For example, the story cinderellaadapted by Charles Perrault, sets the story in a distant country where a beautiful girl, with green eyes and blonde hair, lives with her despot stepmother and capricious stepsisters.
It is up to her to do all the housework, she eats the leftovers that her stepsisters leave and is often dirty, which is why she was called Cinderella.
In this story they do not describe what was inside the house, what city it was in, how big the building was, but they do tell us that Cinderella is a tender and sweet girl, exploited and subjected to bad conditions by her stepmother, whose father seems to be absent.
What the story tells us is that Cinderella’s father had a high social status, but his absence from home allowed the stepmother and her daughters to mistreat the daughter and confine her to the servants’ quarters.
The sociocultural environment tells us if the characters belong to a specific social class, if they are religious or not, if they are foreigners, if they are cultured, etc.
References
Literature and literary genres. Recovered from educarchile.cl.
Setting or space in the narrative. Retrieved from portaleducativo.net.