Just Where Is It? An Overview of Setting

Setting is an important part of a story, but it can be helpful to break it down in order to better identify what it is and how and why it appears. In my post on “Volar” I alluded to the nuances that Setting can take. Specifically, Setting can be described in four different but related ways:

• Spatial: This parameter deals with the physical setting, ranging from natural and rural settings like: mountains, forests, deserts, and even man made features like buildings, rooms, roads, etc.
• Political: Cities, states, nations. This is when a setting is bounded by a man-specified, but not necessarily man-made boundary. This includes countries, cities, counties, etc.
• Temporal: When does the story take place, and how long it takes.
• Cultural: When peoples or groups share a common heritage that, despite spatial or political differences, brings them together. The easiest way to think of this is in terms of religion. If you attend a religious service in one country and the same one in a different country, you can expect there to be some similarities.

A story like Robert Galbraith's Cuckoo's Calling has a clear political setting: London. But this also means it has distinct spatial settings as well, as London is a major urban area. Cultural setting gets trickier, especially as the spatial setting gets larger and the political setting gets a greater population density. For example, Cuckoo's Calling follows a private detective as he has to deal with people from a few distinct subcultures: the fashion industry, law offices, and half-way homes. The sequel, The Silkworm, still largely takes place in London, but deals with the publishing industry juxtaposed against a different class of lower income than that found in Cuckoo’s Calling. Any given spatial or political location will have different cultural settings, only some of which the author will use.

The next distinction to bear in mind for setting is scope. Some settings will be large and vast and others small, and most stories maneuver from one setting to another. Cuckoo's Calling doesn't leave the city proper of London, but contrast this with any fantasy epic, like The Hobbit where the characters traverse caves, forests, mountains, towns, and cities: they never stay in any one place for long. But even a city can be a large setting to deal with, while others, like “Volar” are confined to an apartment or a room, like Raskolnikov's apartment in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, or Gregor Samsa's room in Kafka's “The Metamorphosis”.

It can be difficult to separate one setting from another, especially when dealing with the scope of temporal and cultural settings. A story with a temporal setting of 1930 and a political setting of the United States of America will be very unusual if it does not have something to do with the Great Depression, i.e., The Grapes of Wrath, which will greatly shape the Cultural setting. Other settings will be more allegorical, like the film and TV show M*A*S*H, which took place during the Korean War, but were more about the Vietnam War. Other settings will be more flexible; a good example of this would be most police procedural shows.

Setting is an important part of understanding a narrative because it, quite literally, gives a backdrop to the story. It is the first way to contextualize and understand just what is going on and why it is significant. Setting, literally, grounds a narrative in a time and a place, even if they are imagined, and give us an opportunity to better understand the characters, events, and themes of a story as we better understand the world they interact with.

So, whatever you're reading, pay attention to the setting. If the author has something, a simple event or the entire story, take place somewhere or someplace specific, it's probably for a reason.