【正文】 re 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 understanding 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 contain 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 statement 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 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 is 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 purpose 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 Midas’s mentality. A setting may be detailed or sketchy. It depends on the novelist’s purpose of writing and his idea of works 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 event in the novel whereas exposition is only the initiating action. 1. The elements making up a setting By 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 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 geographical location, its topography, scenery, and such physical arrangements as the location of the windows and doors in a room。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, WellLighted Place”, we feel that Hemingway is indirectly giving us advice 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, WellLighted Place” contains several themes and other statements could be made to take in Hemingway’s view of love, of munication 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 Tom’s Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath treat the themes of slavery and migratory labor respectively, this is to use theme in a larger and more abstract sense than it is in our discussion of Hemingway’s “A Clean, WellLighted Place.” In this larger sense it is relatively easy to say that Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Updike’s A amp。 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 repelled 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 Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, 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 start of the story, the narrator describes a colonial jailhouse: Before this ugly edifice, and between it and the wheeltrack of the street, was a grassplot, much overgrown with burdock, pigweed, appleperu, and such unsightly vegetation, which evidently found something congenial in the soil that had 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 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 grassplot overgrown with burdock and pigweed and something as beautiful as a wild rose. As the story unfolds, he will further