The Importance of Settng

The Importance of the Setting
The setting of a story is where the story takes place and its time and in most cases very important to the plot and the success of the story. Oftentimes, the setting can be seen as a character in and of themselves.
In Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tell Tale Heart,” most of the story takes place in the old man’s apartment and the climax of the story occurs in the old man’s bedroom. The room in itself is very important. The description of the room is very detailed by the narrator who has an obsession with watching this man sleep and is driven crazy by the man’s blue eye. One night the man wakes up and sees the narrator. The narrator becomes so startled by the man’s supposed loud heartbeat that he kills the old man, dismembers his body and hides it beneath the floorboards of the room. The sound of the thumping heart drives him mad and once he kills the old man he thinks it to be gone. That is the point where the setting becomes important.
The police come to question the narrator about the complaint of the old man shrieking. He is able to entertain the police and make them believe that everything is okay. That is until the point that the setting comes alive. The floorboards begin to rattle and once again he can hear the sound the pounding heart over and over again. If the author had not put so much detail into the setting such as mentioning the floorboards ahead of time, the reader would not fully grasp the magnitude of the climax. The setting was important to help understand just what exactly drove the narrator mad.
John Updike’s “A &P,” the story takes place in the grocery store, a place that has become the bane of Sammy’s existence. The setting is important in this story because if Sammy had been occupied, he wouldn’t have noticed the girls. Since he did not really do much work in the store, he was able to focus on the three girls that walked in and start to fantasize about them.
Since it is in a supermarket, the girls have time to...