SETTING, TONE AND

ATMOSPHERE
General Literature
Department of English Literature
UIN Jakarta (2023)
 SETTING
 Setting is an environment or surrounding in which an event or story
takes place or the time and place (or when and where) of the story.

 It’s a literary element of literature used in novels, short stories, plays,

films, etc., and usually introduced during the exposition (beginning) of
the story, along with the characters.

 The setting may also include the environment of the story, which can
be made up of the physical location, climate, weather, or social and
cultural surroundings.

 It may provide particular information about placement and timing, such

as Jakarta, Indonesia, in the year 1945.

 The setting of a story can change throughout the plot.

Setting could be simply descriptive, like a lonely cottage on a mountain, social conditions,
historical time, geographical locations, weather, immediate surroundings.
TIME, PLACE and ENVIRONMENT
SETTING
 Time setting can cover many areas, such as the character’s time of
life, the time of day, time of year, time period such as the past,
present, or future, etc.

 Place setting also covers a lot of areas, such as a certain building,

room in a building, country, city, beach, in a mode of transport such as
a car, bus, boat, indoors or out, etc.

 Environment setting includes geographical location such as beach or

mountains, the climate and weather, and the social or cultural aspects
such as a school, theatre, meeting, club, etc.
 Types of Setting

Backdrop
Setting
Backdrop setting emerges when it is not important for
a story, and it could happen in any setting.

Integral
Setting
It is when the place and time influence
the theme, character, and action of a story.
 Backdrop
Setting

The story is timeless and can happen at any point in history or anywhere.
The focus is on the lesson or message being delivered.
Usually it is available in fairy tales and children’s stories.
The lessons that the characters learn is the point rather than the time
period.
It’s hard to tack a “past, present, or future” on the time aspect of the setting.

It could also be any town or country, which means children anywhere can
relate to it.
 Integral
Setting

The time and place are important to the story.

For example, a story dealing with a historical setting will have a direct impact on the plot.
A story that happens in the 1800s will not have technology, so the characters will have to
write a letter, ride a horse or take a carriage to visit each other; they cannot travel long
distances in one day as we do now with cars, buses, and planes.
This will have a direct impact on the events of the story, especially if there is distance
involved.
 Example
October arrived, spreading a damp chill over the grounds and into the castle. Madam Pomfrey, the nurse,
was kept busy by a sudden spate of colds among the staff and students. Her Pepperup potion worked
instantly, though it left the drinker smoking at the ears for several hours afterward. Ginny Weasley, who
had been looking pale, was bullied into taking some by Percy. The steam pouring from under her vivid
hair gave the impression that her whole head was on fire (Rowling, The Chamber of Secrets 1999).

WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of
respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her
house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten
years.
It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and
scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most
select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of
that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the
cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to
join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among
the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.
(Faulkner, A Rose for Emily” 1930)
 The Important of Setting
• Setting gives context to the characters’ actions in a story line.
• It can also create the mood (how the reader or viewer feels).
• It’s easier to understand why the characters in the story are doing what
they’re doing when we know where they are.
• The time of day, time of year, and ages of the characters will also affect how
they act and what they say.
• All forms of literature will have some form of setting; even backdrop
settings have an age range of the characters, which is part of time, and a
location, either indoors or out, for example.
• Without a setting, readers and viewers cannot follow a story plot. The plot
line would be confusing and boring
TONE
o Tone, in written composition, is an attitude of an author toward
a subject or an audience.
o It is generally conveyed through the choice of words, or the
viewpoint of a writer on a particular subject.
o Every written piece comprises a central theme or subject matter.
o The manner in which a writer approaches this theme and
subject is the tone.
o The tone can be formal, informal, serious, comic, sarcastic, sad,
or cheerful, or it may be any other existing attitude.
 Consider the following examples of tone:

I want to ask the authorities what is the big deal? Why do they not control the
epidemic? It is eating up lives like a monster.”

“I want to draw the attention of the appropriate authorities toward damage caused by
the epidemic. If steps are not taken to curb it, it will further injure our community.”

The theme of both tone examples is the same. The only way we can differentiate
between them is their separate tone. The tone in the first example is casual or informal
while, it is more formal in the second.
 Function of Tone
1. Tone, in a piece of literature, decides how the readers read a literary piece, and how
they should feel while they are reading it.
2. It stimulates the readers to read a piece of literature as a serious, comical,
spectacular, or distressing manner.
3. It lends shape and life to a piece of literature because it creates a mood.
4. It bestows voice to characters, and throws light on the personalities and dispositions
of characters that readers understand better.
5. It affects how readers will respond to your writing. Although its effects can be very
subtle, they are profound, in much the same way as a person’s body language and
overall personality. You may not be able to put your finger on exactly why, but
different people have a remarkably different kind of presence, and the same thing is
true of writing.
 Exercise
1. “It was very late and everyone had left the cafe except an old man who sat in the
shadow the leaves of the tree made against the electric light. In the day time the street
was dusty, but at night the dew settled the dust and the old man liked to sit late
because he was deaf and now at night it was quiet and he felt the difference.”

2. “It was A LOW, DULL, QUICK SOUND – MUCH SUCH A SOUND AS A WATCH MAKES
WHEN ENVELOPED IN COTTON. I gasped for breath, and yet the officers heard it not. I
talked more quickly, more vehemently but the noise steadily increased. I arose and
argued about trifles, in a high key and with violent gesticulations; but the noise steadily
increased. Why WOULD they not be gone? I paced the floor to and fro with heavy
strides, as if excited to fury by the observations of the men, but the noise steadily
increased. O God! What COULD I do?”

3. And the trees all died. They were orange trees. I don’t know why they died, they just
died. Something wrong with the soil possibly or maybe the stuff we got from the
nursery wasn’t the best. We complained about it. So we’ve got thirty kids there, each
kid had his or her own little tree to plant and we’ve got these thirty dead trees. All
these kids looking at these little brown sticks, it was depressing.”
 Atmosphere
 Atmosphere is the overall mood of a story or poem.

 It’s usually something readers can’t quite put their finger on – not a motif or a
theme, but a “feel” that readers get as they read.

 Atmosphere mainly emerges through description rather than action – it’s not what
people do that creates an atmosphere, but the settings and environments
that stage what they do.

 Atmosphere basically determines the emotional experience that the reader will have.
Are they going to feel hopeful? Depressed? Anxious? Curious? Adventurous? You set
the mood through atmosphere, and it colors how the audience experiences the whole
piece.

 Certain genres are especially dependent on atmosphere. Horror, for example, is an

extremely atmosphere-dependent genre.
Function
The purpose of establishing atmosphere is to create emotional effect.
It makes a literary work lively, fascinating, and interesting by keeping the audience
more engaged.
It appeals to the readers’ senses by making the story more real, allowing them to
comprehend the idea easily.
Since atmosphere makes the audience feel in an indirect way, writers can convey
harsh feelings with less severity.
 Example
1. During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the
year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been
passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country,
and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within
view of the melancholy House of Usher.” (Edgar Allen Poe, The Fall of the
House of Usher)

2. “It is an unspoken hunger we deflect with knives – one avocado between

us, cut neatly in half, twisted then separated from the large wooden pit.
With the green fleshy boats in hand, we slice vertical strips from one end to
the other. Vegetable planks. We smother the avocado with salsa, hot chiles
at noon in the desert. We look at each other and smile, eating avocados
with sharp silver blades, risking the blood of our tongues repeatedly.” Terry
Tempest Williams, An Unspoken Hunger
 The high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and
from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of
the great valley a closed pot. On the broad, level land floor the gang plows bit deep and left
the black earth shining like metal where the shares had cut. On the foothill ranches across
the Salinas River, the yellow stubble fields seemed to be bathed in pale cold sunshine, but
there was no sunshine in the valley now in December. The thick willow scrub along the
river flamed with sharp and positive yellow leaves.
It was a time of quiet and of waiting. The air was cold and tender. A light wind
blew up from the southwest so that the farmers were mildly hopeful of a good rain before
long; but fog and rain did not go together.
Across the river, on Henry Allen's foothill ranch there was little work to be done,
for the hay was cut and stored and the orchards were plowed up to receive the rain deeply
when it should come. The cattle on the higher slopes were becoming shaggy and rough-
coated. (Steinback, The Chrysanthemums)
Thank You