Narrative Elements: The Setting

Ortega y Gasset, that the human being is a result of his environment, rather than inheritance. He affirms: "I am me and my circumstance." The environment it forms the setting of the characters: we appear poor, without houses, roads, landscapes and devices. The environment allows the reader to easily approach the characters, without any suddenness.

The writer must collect truthful data to create the environment of his work; he would fail if he tried to reconstruct situations and places that are unknown or little known to him. I quote a setting that Chekhov offers us in his work The Fool:
The weather had been beautiful, very peaceful since the beginning of the day.

Some blackbirds were whistling; further afield, on the side of the ponds, they sounded like complaints; they would have said living breaths passing to an empty bottle. A woodcock flew through the air; a shot rang out, which was reverberated happily in the springtime atmosphere... But behold, the lower part of the forest was already darkened; a bad east wind blew; cold and piercing. Fine needles of ice stretched out over the pools; and the forest became even darker, inhospitable, deserted, dead... It was still winter.

This is the case of a poor student of the ecclesiastical academy, Ivan Velikoplski, the son of the sacristan, was returning to his house, after a whole day spent on the lookout. He walked the narrow lanes of the flooded grasslands, his fingers numb, he roasted on fire from the burns of the wind. That sudden onslaught of cold seemed an anomaly to him; the harmony of things was broken by her; nature itself was troubled, and the darkness of the night had thickened more rapidly than usual. The countryside was empty, gloomy. On the river side, however, in the "widows' garden" a fire was shining: but further and even beyond the town, a league away, everything was equally flooded in the cold shade. "(Cf. Complementary bibliography, No. 16).

It is easy to see that all the elements, which make up the environment in the transcribed passage, they are perfectly balanced: there is no excess or lack of details.
Knut Hamsun, in his book Hunger for him, offers us a well-accomplished ambition:

"Winter had arrived, a humid and miserable winter, almost without snow: a perpetual night, gloomy and misty, without the slightest blow of fresh wind in a whole week. Lanterns were lit most of the day in the streets, and yet people stumbled in the fog. All the noises, the ringing of the bells, the bells of the hired horses, the voices human, the noise of hoofs on the pavement sounded dull, as if enveloped in the atmosphere thick. The weeks passed and the weather did not change.

I wanted to live in the Uaterland neighborhood. He was more and more firmly attached to that inn, that hotel furnished for travelers. where they allowed me to live, despite my misery. My money had been exhausted for a long time, but I kept going back and forth, as if I had the right or as if it were from the house. The landlady did not say anything to me: but not for that reason did she torment me the less the impossibility of paying her. Thus three weeks passed.

I had been working for several days, without being able to write anything that satisfied me: despite my application and my constant attempts, inspiration did not come. It was the same as trying to develop a theme like another; luck was not smiling at me. "(Cf. Complementary bibliography, No. 26)