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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 Sonny’s Blues
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
“Sonny’s Blues” is set in Harlem—a neighborhood in New York City—in the 1950s. Harlem became majority Black over the first half of the 20th century due to the Great Migration, a mass relocation of Black Americans from the South (which was forcibly segregated by Jim Crow laws) to the North (where racial segregation still existed but in a less extreme form). Here the unnamed narrator reflects on his experience of Harlem from childhood through (early) adulthood:
These streets hadn’t changed, though housing projects jutted up out of them now like rocks in the middle of a boiling sea. […] [H]ouses exactly like the houses of our past yet dominated the landscape, boys exactly like the boys we once had been found themselves smothering in these houses, came down into the streets for light and air and found themselves encircled by disaster. Some escaped the trap, most didn’t.
Related Themes:
