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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
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
“A Temporary Matter” is set in Boston, Massachusetts, most likely in the 1990s (when Lahiri wrote the story). While the narrator flashes back to scenes in different locations—such as the hospital where Shoba delivered her stillborn baby and food markets on the streets of Boston—the present day of the story is set entirely within the married couple’s home. This is intentional on Lahiri’s part—by keeping readers “trapped” inside Shoba and Shukumar’s home, she communicates the ways that the couple feels trapped in their unhappy marriage after losing their baby.
The house is not a neutral place for Shoba and Shukumar, given the way that it contains traces of the child they lost. This comes across in the following passage:
[Shoba] would look around the walls of the room, which they had decorated together last summer with a border of marching ducks and rabbits playing trumpets and drums. By the end of August there was a cherry crib under the window, a white changing table with mint-green knobs, and a rocking chair with checkered cushions. Shukumar had disassembled it all before bringing Shoba back from the hospital, scraping off the rabbits and ducks with a spatula.
Here the narrator describes Shoba visiting Shukumar in his “office” which, just six months earlier, had been a nursery for their unborn baby. The narrator’s descriptions of Shukumar “scraping” the rabbit and duck wallpaper off the walls and of Shoba silently “look[ing] around the walls of the room” capture the way that the loss of their baby haunts them (as well as the house), fueling their grief.
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