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Satire
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
Chapter 24: Berry Picking
Explanation and Analysis:
Though the first three chapters take place in Mockingburg, New York, the majority of the novel takes place on the coast of the Canadian province of Newfoundland, in a small town called Killick-Claw. Based on its historical and cultural references, readers can glean that the novel is set in the early 1990s.
With her vivid poetic language, Proulx describes the setting in great detail; each sentence or sentence fragment is a detail that accumulates into paragraphs to capture the setting, like in the following passage from Chapter 24:
Blunt fogbows in the morning trip around the bay. Humps of color followed squalls, Billy Pretty babbled of lunar halos. Storms flew in and out. Sudden sleet changed to glowing violet rods, collapsed in rain. Two, three days of heat as though blown from a desert. Fibres of light crawling down the bay like luminous eels.
While civilization obviously exists on the island, there are times when it seems isolated from the rest of the world. Quoyle observes this quality on a walk in Chapter 26:
At last the end of the world, a wild place that seemed poised on the lip of the abyss. No human sign, nothing, no ship, no plane, no animal, no bird, no bobbing trap marker nor buoy. As though he stood alone on the planet. The immensity of the sky roared at him and instinctively he raised his hands to keep it off.
Most of the people who live in Killick-Claw have lived there their entire lives, so there is an intimate feeling of community and shared history. At the same time, globalization and global capitalism have subsumed even the most remote places into their orbit, and the residents of Killick-Claw feel this tug toward modernity.
Related Themes:
Chapter 26: Deadman
Explanation and Analysis:
Though the first three chapters take place in Mockingburg, New York, the majority of the novel takes place on the coast of the Canadian province of Newfoundland, in a small town called Killick-Claw. Based on its historical and cultural references, readers can glean that the novel is set in the early 1990s.
With her vivid poetic language, Proulx describes the setting in great detail; each sentence or sentence fragment is a detail that accumulates into paragraphs to capture the setting, like in the following passage from Chapter 24:
Blunt fogbows in the morning trip around the bay. Humps of color followed squalls, Billy Pretty babbled of lunar halos. Storms flew in and out. Sudden sleet changed to glowing violet rods, collapsed in rain. Two, three days of heat as though blown from a desert. Fibres of light crawling down the bay like luminous eels.
While civilization obviously exists on the island, there are times when it seems isolated from the rest of the world. Quoyle observes this quality on a walk in Chapter 26:
At last the end of the world, a wild place that seemed poised on the lip of the abyss. No human sign, nothing, no ship, no plane, no animal, no bird, no bobbing trap marker nor buoy. As though he stood alone on the planet. The immensity of the sky roared at him and instinctively he raised his hands to keep it off.
Most of the people who live in Killick-Claw have lived there their entire lives, so there is an intimate feeling of community and shared history. At the same time, globalization and global capitalism have subsumed even the most remote places into their orbit, and the residents of Killick-Claw feel this tug toward modernity.
Related Themes:
