In my Plus 2 Advanced English course, we had a one act play titled ‘The Little Man ‘written by John Galsworthy. It is a play about the Universality of the little man who is far taller than all the other characters in the play. What he lacks in terms of physical attributes is more than redeemed in his wonderful humanism and empathy. The setting for the play is a small wayside railway station and the setting reflects the mixture of races. In the play the station reflects the metaphoric journey that all of us are going through in life.
Setting is important for a story, since the setting of a tale creates the aura, the mood and the atmospheric effect of the story. Very often, this effect is a corollary of the setting, and infuses the characters. In the novels of Thomas Hardy, the setting is the rural country side of Wessex. In the novels of Charles Dickens, the setting is the middle class urban landscape of London. In the novels of R.K. Narayan, the weight of Malgudi, with its sense of the mundane and the comical hangs on all the characters. In the novel Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, the presence of the moor is unmistakable. It defines the grotesqueness and wildness of the story with a hint of some unknown force at work. In the play, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, the setting is a nameless place under a tree where the two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon gather to wait for an entity called Godot. The non- descriptive and unknown nature of the place is important as it removes any referential value and speaks of human suffering in abstraction as a philosophical issue. In the novel Lord of the Flies by William Golding, the setting is an island on which a group of English school boys are marooned and the island, bereft of any hint of civilization seems to represent a return to a state of primary nature and atavistic pleasure. In the novel Crime and Punishment of Dostoyevsky, the setting is a festering urban neighborhood of St Petersburg where Raskolnikov is lured into his personal vision of emancipation to commit a murder. In the novel, The Cossacks, by Leo Tolstoy, the setting is a village in the Cossacks where Olenin has volunteered to serve his commission. The frank candor of the place is a sharp contrast to the sophistry in Olenin’s behavior.
Lermontov’s,’ A Hero of our Times’ captures the free and wild rebelliousness of the Caucasus which permeates the setting and imbues the protagonist with a sense of adventure and thrill. Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekov made splendid use of setting in their short stories. The picture of the poor clerk in Gogol’s ‘The Cloak’ roaming the streets of St Petersburg is a pathetic sight.
Setting can be compared to what cinematography is to the film medium. The task of the novelist is more difficult though, as the visual medium has to be supplemented with the linguistic resources the novelist can marshal. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is another novel which makes spectacular use of setting. The free flowing Mississippi symbolizes the spirit of freedom and gaiety that marks Huck’s character and his journey on the river is in a way, an escape from the cloistered and controlled view of life that Widow Douglas makes him go through.
What better way than a Christian monastery for Dostoyevsky to posit his grand questions on belief, faith, love and piety? Examining all these questions figuratively and metaphysically, Dostoyevsky in the novel ‘Brothers Karamazov’ torments Alyosha’s faith as the putrefying corpse of Father Zossima belies popular expectation to the contrary and Father Ferapont who had all along denied himself by humbling the flesh, speaks of the sin of a life of easiness, love and spreading happiness rather than humiliation and penance. Only Dostoyevsky can examine arguments of such a grand scale.(To be continued)