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Personification
Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
Indian Horse is set in mid-1900s Canada, and it accordingly surveys a nation that can be hauntingly beautiful but also horrific due to how Indigenous people are treated. Saul’s stay at God’s lake and hours-long drives across the country are storehouses of imagery. “The stars pinwheeled above us,” Saul recalls while thinking back to the nights with his grandmother. “Lakes were shining phosphorescent platters,” he describes during the trips to cross-country hockey games. The novel celebrates the natural world through its attentiveness to the Canadian landscape.
But that same scenery can be equally terrifying. The Moose team’s travels to sleepy towns expose them to all manner of insults and stereotypes, pulling back the curtain on the country’s racist underbelly. During one night at the bar, white men punch down each of Indian’s team members and urinate on them. Fans spit on him and other players slam him against the plexiglass—but none of which compares to the atrocities that go down in the residential schools. “St. Jerome’s was hell on earth,” Saul writes. There, priests rape the kids at night and beat the students at random. Indian Horse’s narrative dovetails with the history of centuries-old institutions and their horrifically gruesome acts; residential schools like St. Jerome’s took root as early as the 1800s and didn’t close until 1997. Through Saul’s reckoning with loss and abuse, the novel stares straight at the ghastly injustices inscribed in the country’s history.
