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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
Key Examples in A Horseman in the Sky
Part 1
Explanation and Analysis:
“A Horseman in the Sky” is set in western Virginia during the American Civil War in the 1860s. In the Civil War, Southern Confederate states (including Virginia) sought to secede from the Northern Union states in order to continue the practice of slavery. In the story, Druse chooses to fight for the Union while his father fights for the Confederacy, an example of the ways that the Civil War split some families down the middle.
In Part 1 of the story, Bierce spends several paragraphs describing the specific geography of Virginia, where Druse and his fellow Union soldiers are planning their attack, as seen in the following passage:
The configuration of the valley, indeed, was such that from this point of observation it seemed entirely shut in, and one could but have wondered how the road which found a way out of it had found a way into it, and whence came and whither went the waters of the stream that parted the meadow more than a thousand feet below.
No country is so wild and difficult but men will make it a theatre of war.
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