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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:
Black Boy is set in many different locations as Richard and his family move around the American South in Part I. The novel begins in a small house where Richard and his siblings live with his mother and father. His father leaves early on, and Richard is placed in an orphanage in Memphis because his mother cannot afford to support him. After Richard is released from the orphanage, he and his mother move back and forth between Granny's house in Jackson, Mississippi, a dark and unpleasant place, and Aunt Maggie's house in Elaine, Arkansas (specifically, the nearby town of West Helena), which is generally kinder. Richard then sets off for Memphis again, where he moves in with the Moss family. There he begins to read widely and begins his intellectual development in earnest.
Later, in Part II, Richard and his family move to Chicago, where they live on the South Side, in the historically Black and impoverished area of the city. In all these locations, Richard holds a staggering quantity of different jobs and attends multiple schools, in a wide variety of settings which are all addressed briefly; all these settings are essentially the same to Richard, though, as he is repeatedly demeaned and abused by White people whenever he enters into one of these circumstances.
As the book is a memoir, the temporal setting follows Wright's life, beginning when he is about four in 1912. Part I continues to when Richard is 17 in 1925. Part II follows Richard's early 20s in Chicago, and the novel ends in 1936. Certain historical events appear that bolster his historical setting. Richard recalls being let out of school for the armistice that ended World War I in 1919, a conflict of which he otherwise seems to have been unaware. Part II also shows the rise of communism, especially among Black people, in American urban areas like Chicago. These are important to the historical setting, to be sure, but for most of the memoir Richard believes that his life is separate from most of the events happening in the world, as they do not apply to him, a Black man. The setting, then, is primarily attached to Richard's life and times, rather than the historical context.
