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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:
The main action of the novel is set during the late 1960s in Corrigan, a fictional small town in Australia. Growing up in Corrigan, Charlie Bucktin has always felt very sheltered. His father gives him books to read so that he can learn about the wider world. He and his friend Jeffrey Lu listen to sports on the radio and wonder if the impending moon landing will take place. Everything they are interested in seems to be happening far away from them. Danger lies far away, too. For example, Charlie occasionally refers to the Vietnam War. Charlie isn't sure what to make of the war, but he seems to have the sense that it is not really his problem. At the end of the day, Charlie has always felt safe and a little bored in his own isolated bed. He hopes that one day he will live a bit more glamorously as a writer in New York.
Charlie's illusion of safety begins to crack in the first chapter, when Jasper Jones comes to his window and brings him to the clearing where Laura Wishart has died. Plunged into what he believes is a murder mystery, Charlie is forced to reckon with the realization that danger and violence exist in Corrigan as well as in the outside world. He soon learns that the plainest-seeming households sometimes conceal terrible danger and abuse the likes of which he has only read about. Jasper's request that Charlie help protect him from vengeful White townspeople by disposing of Laura's body opens Charlie's eyes to the ways in which Corrigan has always been a dangerous place for people who are not White. Being bored there is a privilege that Jasper, a poor, half-Aboriginal boy, does not enjoy because he is constantly under suspicion and threat. Silvey draws on Harper Lee's depiction of fictional Maycomb, Alabama, in To Kill a Mockingbird. In that book, too, White children come to see their idyllic hometown as a dangerous hell for those who do not blend in.
Over the course of the novel, Charlie begins to notice that his friend Jeffrey, too, is less sheltered than he previously thought. The Vietnam War comes to Jeffrey's house first when he learns that his extended family in Vietnam has been bombed, and later when Jeffrey's father is the victim of a hate crime. As Charlie witnesses his friends endure injustice, he begins to see how Corrigan is part of the same great big flawed world he has always read about. Charlie still wants to leave Corrigan eventually, but more and more his desire to leave is about escaping the illusion he has been living under. Plenty of White people in Corrigan continue to believe that they are (or ought to be) separate and safe from the pain people are experiencing the world over. Charlie can no longer bear to pretend that he is living in an unassailable bubble.
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