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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 Stranger takes place in the city of Algiers, Algeria in the 1940s, when Algeria was still a French colony. While the story is most famous for its exploration of the absurd, it also explores the tensions between the native Arab population of Algiers and the French colonial settlers, most explicitly through the protagonist Meursault's murder of an Arab man. The setting of the story is then an integral part of the novella and its central conflict.
The effect of the physical setting is likewise significant—the heat of the sun at the beach and the confinement of Meursault to a jail cell are but two examples of settings that actively work to make the story an absurdist novella as opposed to a non-philosophical work of fiction. Meursault is in many ways a victim of his setting: at his trial, he admits to killing the Arab man because of the heat. The fact that he is a victim of his setting is somewhat ironic, considering the story centers around him as a French man killing an Arab man, presumably a native Algerian. Regardless, the setting of The Stranger plays an active role in the story beyond the physical effect the sun has on Meursault: to be sentenced to death in a trial is to be murdered by the state, effectively killed by the very country one resides in.
Related Themes:
