The physical spaces in “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” get both literally and metaphorically smaller throughout the story. The motif of small, cramped spaces is placed in vivid juxtaposition to the grandeur of the environment. Although they’re in a place of stunning, “uncharted” natural vastness, filled with “granite columns” and “grand trees,” the "outcasts" are trapped in tiny communities and snowed-in to minute spaces:
Day by day closer around them drew the snowy circle, until at last they looked from their prison over drifted walls of dazzling white, that towered twenty feet above their heads.
The snow which surrounds them “draws” the outcasts in tighter and tighter as their weeks of starving go on, “towering” over their heads and preventing escape. They have been put in a prison by the natural world as much as they have been restricted by the brutal and uncaring edicts of the town they were banished from. This shrinking of the world is apparent from the beginning, however. Poker Flat itself is a small town where everybody’s business is known. Once they are banished, the characters attempt to journey to Sandy Bar, an even smaller "camp," and on their way are imprisoned by a seemingly never-ending snowstorm in an even more claustrophobic environment—the cabin and its surroundings. The motif makes the crushing nature of strict social morality very evident to the reader, as the physical spaces the characters occupy echo the limited freedoms they have in their everyday lives.
