a story furnishes

The setting of a story furnishes the location for its world of feeling, the dif­ ferent emotional associations awakened in the reader’s mind by a gloomy New England forest in a Hawthorne story, a dank burial crypt in a Poe story, or a crowded Manhattan subway train in a Paley story. A sense of place is essential for us to imagine the fictional characters’ situations as the author creates the story.

Place helps the characters seem real, but, to be most effective, the setting must also have a dramatic use. It must be shown, or at least felt, to affect char­ acter or plot. The emergency brake in the subway car precipitates the disaster of Samuel’s death. Exchanging the windy street in Salem village for the dreary, solitary path through the tangled forest leads Young Goodman Brown straight to the devil. Imagining the details of setting in the creation of stories, writers must exert their talents to make the reader see only the fictional world that emerges on the printed page, under the illusion that while the story unfolds, it is the real world itself.

POINT OF VIEW

Point of view refers to the author’s choice of a narrator for the story. At the start, the writer must decide whether to employ first-person narration, using the pronoun I, or third-person narration, using the pronouns he, she, and they. (Second-person narration, you, is less common, although the dramatic intimacy of second-person narrative address is often used in poetry and song

14 The Elements of Fiction: A Storyteller’s Means

lyrics.) The writer’s choice of a point of view to narrate stories usually falls into two major categories:

FIRST-PERSON NARRATION (NARRATOR APPARENTLY A PARTICIPANT IN THE STORY)

1. A major character 2. A minor character

THIRD-PERSON NARRATION (NARRATOR A NONPARTICIPANT IN THE STORY)

1. Omniscient-seeing into the minds of all characters 2. Limited omniscient-seeing into one or, sometimes, two characters’

minds 3. Objective-seeing into none of the characters’ minds

First-Person Narration

Samuel is the protagonist, but telling his side of the story in a first-person narration by a major character isn’t Paley’s objective as a writer in “Samuel.” The young boy -dies before the conclusion of events, before she reaches the point she wants to make as the storyteller. Perhaps we can imagine Samuel telling his story in the first person from his vantage point in heaven, but then Paley is a realistic writer.