The Use of the Setting in Boosting the Theme of Solitude in Selected Modern Short Stories

Abstract

Human beings recollect memories, events, or certain actions by the way the snow-flakes cover the leaves of the olive tree in their backyard. It is the setting that gives life much of its meaning, shape and color. For the story writer, setting is the entrance for his readers through which they wander in the world which he creates. Setting is a crucial element of the narrative fiction. In some works of literature, it functions as a character. In certain cases (say a prison, for instance) the psychological toll of setting can be devastating. Writers intentionally set their stories in such a way as to guide their characters and help them not to go astray in outer space and time. The specific time, geographical location, and the mood of the character help the story evolve to attract the reader’s attention to what happens next. The texts chosen for this study have the theme of solitude in common. The researchers intend to explore the setting in these texts as they aim at finding the knot which ties the setting and the theme of solitude together. This study follows an interpretive-analytical methodology in which nine modern short stories are closely examined. The literary theory adopted in this research is psychoanalysis; for each text a method of psychoanalysis is applied. The researchers will answer the question of whether the setting plays any role in accelerating the characters’ awareness of solitude, despair and loneliness. The texts are Anton Chekhov’s “The Bet” (1889), Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill” (1920), D. H. Lawrence’s “The Rocking-Horse Winner” (1926), Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever” (1934), Earnest Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path” (1941), Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (1968), Tobias Wolff’s “Hunters in the Snow” (1981), and Judith Ortiz Cofer’s “American History” (1993). Due to the nature of this topic, it will be inevitable to make reference to the plot in the works selected for this paper.