The Siege of Leningrad
There are three points to be considered as setting: time, place, and atmosphere. Time of setting is divided into four classfications. The first
classfication is present time, “a writer may choose to write a book about his own time, about the things that are happening around him.” The story background
which the writer writes happened during the time he lives. For example, Oliver Twist
by Dickens, it tells about the injusticies toward poor people in England, the situation pictured in the story happened around Dickens’ time. The second
classification namely past time, shows that “a writer may choose to go backwards in time, to write about historical events, to attempt to illuminate the past to his
readers.” For instance, like what Robert Graves writes in his two novels I, Claudius
and Claudius the God. The story of the novels takes place during the lifetime of Claudius the emperor. Future time is the third classification, “a writer
may in his imagination take his readers into the future.” This kind of time of setting can be seen in The Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. He is a
modern writer that writes about the anarchy of a future world. The last classification is no spesific time, “a writer may choose to give his readers no
indication of the time in which his story takes place. It takes place, as it were, in no time or any time. They are something like we read on the old fairy stories; they
happen ‘once upon a time’.” It can be seen in Animal Farmby George Orwell p.144.
The next point of setting is place. Place of setting is classified into three kinds, namely familiar place, unfamiliar place and imaginary place. Familiar place
presents that “a writer may choose to set his story in a place which he considers is
familiar to most of his readers, either from experience or by close acquintance.” For instance, The Master by C.P. Snow, the story takes place in a great university.
The next classification is unfamiliar place, “a writer may choose to set his novel in a place that is likely to be fairly unfamiliar to many of the readers of his own
nation.” For example, the Anthony Burgess’Malayan Trilogy, the story takes place in South-east Asia. The last classification is imaginary place, shows that “a
writer may choose to set his book in an entirely imaginary place which is not familiar to anyone at all.” For example, Gulliver by Jonathan Swift, the story
takes place in some imaginary places, Liliput, described as a land where the little people live, Brobdignag, it is a land where the giants live, there is also the land of
Houyhnhnms, a place ruled by magnificent horses, and a floating island which is called Laputa.
The last point of setting is atmosphere. Murphy 1972 states that: Sometimes people talk about the atmosphere of a novel or of part of a
novel. By this they mean the general feeding that is conveyed to the reader. The word ‘atmosphere’ is used in the same way as it would be used in
everyday speech. A person might say, for instance, ‘The meeting between the workers an the management was conducted in a genial atmosphere.’
This means that the person considered that the general feeling he got from the meeting was one of geniality or friendliness. Thus we can talk of the
atmosphere of a novel or of part of it as being: gloomy, sombre, terrifying, evil, cheerful, happy, sordid, pessimistic, optimistic, and so on p.145- 46.