Setting and Characters in The Last Leaf and The Ultimate Safari - Essay Example

Setting and characters in “The Last Leaf” and “The Ultimate Safari” Setting can have a profound impact on the lives of the people involved, both in real life and in fictitious stories. For the purposes of this discussion, it will be important to remember that setting refers to more than just the place in which a story takes shape. It also refers to time, culture, way of life and shared assumptions and beliefs within the community of the characters involved. A good author will use setting to help define their character, especially in the short story, as it provides a succinct method of description that cannot be obtained otherwise. To illustrate the various ways in which setting can be used to identify and mold the characters of a story, we will compare and contrast the effects of setting on the main characters involved in William Sidney Porter’s “The Last Leaf” (O. Henry) and Nadine Gordimer’s “The Ultimate Safari.” In “The Last Leaf,” the story opens with a description of the “crazy and broken” streets that “make strange angles and curves.” Immediately the reader is placed in mind of either a broken down part of town or an artist’s mecca, which indeed this area of town has become as we learn in the very next paragraph. As the area becomes associated with artists in the reader’s mind, an idea of the culture of the area becomes clear. With this association to the land of imagination, creativity and make-believe, the reader is more inclined to believe one of the main characters, Johnsy, would truly die once the last leaf fell from the ivy vines outside her window. This belief is, to some degree, also shared by her roommate Sudie and their downstairs neighbor, Mr. Behrman. Understanding that Sudie’s fear regarding the vine is strong enough to mention her concern to their neighbor indicates this conviction of her roommate’s is at least halfway believable to the character. This is further emphasized as Sudie and Mr. Behrman “peered out the window fearfully at the ivy vine. Then they looked at each other for a moment without speaking.” Mr. Behrman’s final masterpiece is also an indication of just how much he buys into the concept of an artist who might die simply based on her convictions. To contrast against this culture, this belief in the power of the vine to number out the time Johnsy has left to live, is not shared by the good doctor, who is not a part of the artist culture and cannot understand a woman who would live in order to someday paint the bay of Naples but not for the hope of a good man. However, he is a good doctor who cares about his patients and works for their welfare in both mind and body, as is indicated by his speech to Sue in the hallway. “"I will do all that science, so far as it may filter through my efforts, can accomplish. But whenever my patient begins to count the carriages in her funeral procession I subtract 50 percent from the curative power of medicines. If you will get her to ask one question about the new winter styles in cloak sleeves I will promise you a one-in-five chance for her, instead of one in ten." Rather than believing in the power of outer nature to determine the outcome of a case, the doctor places his beliefs on the practical information science has to offer, but factors in the spiritual conviction of his patients in a way that doesn’t quite negate the importance of the artists’ beliefs, but doesn’t quite support it either, which only serves to heighten the worry on the part of Johnsy’s friends. The vine itself, the one that contains the quickly dropping leaves, exists just outside the window of the sickroom and is described as “an old, old ivy vine, gnarled and decayed at the roots.” It is easy to see, then, why Johnsy might have identified herself with its immediate decay in the winter winds and determined that when the last leaf should fall from the vine, she should die. Just like the “cold, unseen stranger whom doctors called Pneumonia”, “the cold breath of autumn had stricken its leaves from the vine until its skeleton branches clung, almost bare, to the crumbling bricks.” This impression of the vine gives a much clearer picture of the patient in the bed than what might have come through if Porter had simply described her as she lie there. It serves to heighten the idea of decay and death and elicits images of the skeleton and the hopeless clinging vines as a hopeless clinging on the part of her friends to save Johnsy from an early demise. The weather itself gets progressively worse as the story progresses as well. The first mention of weather at all is the indication that the cold breath of autumn had stricken the leaves from the branches of the ivy, but up to this point, the reader has been operating under the assumption that this cold is taking place under a sunny sky. This impression is carefully built with the description of people walking along the streets and Sudie needing to use the light while it still exists in the sky in order to complete her magazine illustrations. The light begins to fade when Sudie goes down to talk to Mr. Behrman in his “dimly lighted den” on the floor below them. Then a “persistent, cold rain” begins to fall, mixed with some snow, heightening the fear and dread that death might yet claim Johnsy. The next night, the “north wind was again loosed, while the rain still beat against the windows and pattered down from the low Dutch eaves” yet still the leaf did not fall, both enabling the storyteller to lead up to his final twist and for the character to come out of her death fascination and back into life. In “The Ultimate Safari” by Nadine Gordimer, the setting displays for the reader the absolute bleakness and emptiness of the characters’ lives. Beginning with a description of the culture in which people went out for oil and never returned home again, where families were defined by whether they had guns or not and where food was so scarce that a mother would risk her life in order to obtain a little bit of oil for her children, this story is full of emptiness. Told from a first person perspective, we get a real sense of the culture of fear that this child has grown up in as she mentions how neither of her parents have ever come home and how it was necessary to hide from the bandits in the bush. “If you meet them, they will kill you,” she says. This fear is so pervading that the children, left in their burned out hut, are afraid to move into the light for fear that someone will come to hurt them because the bandits “ran all over the place and we ran away from them like chickens chased by dogs.” They won’t even move to go ask for help from neighboring villagers for fear that they are bandits instead. In describing the environment through which the little family moves, we get an impression of heat, barrenness and deprivation. There is no food, “Our grandmother took us to look for wild spinach but everyone else in her village did the same and there wasn’t a leaf left,” and no means of obtaining food, “when planting time came our grandfather had no seed to plant.” Trying to make their way through Kruger Park, we get an idea of the dangerous animals that they move among, not just the four-legged variety, but the human animals as well. “Police, wardens, would come and send us back where we came from. He said we must move like animals among the animals, away from the roads, away from the white people’s camps.” The refugees are even forced to avoid any contact with their own kind of people even when facing death by starvation for fear of placing these others in danger as well, “if they helped us they would lose their work. If they saw us, all they could do was pretend we were not there; they had seen only animals.” Through this dusty, dry, desiccated land it is easy to see how the main character begins to lose all sense of connection to this world, describing the details as if she were watching a silent, black and white movie. Occasionally, bursts of emotion come out, as when she is worried about being eaten by a lion perched in a tree one night, but even the disappearance of her grandfather becomes an item of passing interest only. “So everyone waited for our grandfather to catch up. But he didn’t.” The vultures that are designed to clean up the dead from the empty plains are mentioned, but the narrator chooses not to go into too much detail as to what their presence might indicate for the fate of her grandfather. Instead, she chooses to think of him as turning back, going back home and waiting for her to return again to Mozambique. Through these types of descriptions, the idea that everything is ‘away’, like their destination, is very easy to envision. It is this vast emptiness, both inside and out, that gives our narrator the distance necessary to survive this condition of living, somewhat detached from the human emotions that accompany it. “Everything is very quiet when the sun is on your head, inside your head, even if you lie, like the animals, under the trees.” Even ‘away’ turns out to be less than ideal, as the family is forced to live in a very small corner of a tent, which is still described as being among the choice spots. Although she tells it as if it were only a few days, the description of the struggle for survival in the tent is revealed to have lasted at least two years by the end of the story, time that the narrator seems not to have marked, but that have weighed heavily on the grandmother who remarks they have been there “two years and one month” with “nothing. No home” to return to. Within these two stories, the action of each character can be traced from beginning to end in the space of a sentence or two, but it is the setting in which these events take place that provide shape and dimension to these characters. With Porter’s story, we understand the struggle happening among the artist friends to preserve the life of another based on knowledge of what reality is to that person. Through this description, this setting, we are able to understand this world a little better as well, and to see how this has become reality for the character involved. Similarly, while we might imagine a little girl to be crippled by the sudden loss of both father and mother in a war-torn desiccated land, we are able to envision, through the use of setting, how this person was able to detach herself from the surroundings and concentrate on just doing what she needed to do to meet the basic needs of her body. Without setting, these ideas are not clear and therefore cannot help us to understand the alternate world the author is attempting to build for us. Read More