【正文】 vision of life is the special underlying fact of a story, and a theme, abstractly stated, is not the same thing as a vision of life. And we suggest anyway that, in the beginning, you look for whatever truth or insight you think the writer of a story intends to reveal. Try to state a theme in a sentence. By doing so, we will find ourselves looking closely at the story. Kennedy and Gioia make a helpful suggestion to consider the following points when we think about the theme of a story: 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.But it is a mistake to say that the atmosphere of a piece of fiction depends on the setting alone. (As illustrated in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the dialogue at the very beginning of the play helps powerfully to establish the atmosphere of uncertainty, in addition to the setting—the cold midnight castle.) The vocabulary, the figures of speech, and the rhythm of the sentence also help define the general atmosphere, for by these factors the writer manages to control the kind of associations that e to the reader’s mind. Atmosphere also depends on character and action. In short, we may say that the atmosphere of fiction is the pervasive, general feeling, generated by a number of factors (setting, character, action, and style) that is太陽能光伏發(fā)電系統(tǒng)基地建設(shè)項目可行性研究報告項目負(fù)責(zé)人：2010年10月8日７８opinion about, and statement of, the theme.In some stories, a writer seems to draw a setting mainly to evoke atmosphere. In such a story, setting starts us feeling whatever the storyteller would have us feel. Thus atmosphere is a metaphor for a feeling or an impression which we cannot readily attach to some tangible cause. We say that an old farmhouse set among large maples, on a green lawn, has an atmosphere of peace. Here what we mean is that the house, by reason of the look of quietness and by reason of a number of pleasant associations we have with the kind of life lived there, stirs a certain reaction in us which we do not attach to any single incident or object, but generally to the whole scene. In the same way we may say that the setting of a story contributes to defining its atmosphere. For instance, in “The TellTale Heart,” Poe’s setting the action in an old, dark, lanternlit house greatly contributes to the reader’s sense of unease, and so helps to build the story’s effectiveness. Another example is Lawrence’s “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter,” the description at the beginning of which contributes much to the atmosphere of the story.……3. The setting of a novel is not always drawn from a reallife locale.When setting dominates, or when a piece of fiction is written largely to present the manners and customs of a locality, the writing is often called local color writing or regionalism and the writer, a regional writer.Besides place and time, setting may also include the weather, which, indeed, may be crucial in some stories. 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 suggest that secret sin and a pretty child may go together like a pigweed and wild roses. In this artfully crafted novel, setting is intimately blended with characters, symbolism, and theme.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: she loved the place and was loved in the place. The vale, far from the madding crowd of the civilized city, was as serene and pure as the inhabitants. Tess, imbued deeply with the natural hue of the vale and bound closely to this world of simplicity and seclusion, experienced her own delight and happiness though her family was poor. It was, to some extent, her departure from her native place that led to her tragedy. In The Return of the Native, the atmosphere of Egdon Heath prevails over the whole book。First, as we have said, the idea of setting includes the physical environment of a story: a region, a landscape, a city, a village, a street, a house—a particular place or a series of places where a story occurs. (Where a story takes place is sometimes called its locale.) Places in fiction not only provide a location for an action or an event of the story but also provoke feelings in us. A sight of a green field dotted with fluttering daffodils affects us very differently from a sight of a dingy alley, a tropical jungle, or a small house crowded with furniture. In addition to a sense of beauty or ugliness, we usually build up certain associations when we put ourselves in such a scene. We are depressed by a dingy alley, not only because it is ugly, but because it may arouse a feeling, perhaps sometimes unconsciously, of poverty, misery, violence, viciousness, and the struggles of hu