Emotional Emptiness

This sample paper on Emotional Emptiness offers a framework of relevant facts based on the recent research in the field. Read the introductory part, body and conclusion of the paper below.

Setting is the time and place of the actions in the story. However, setting can be more than this. Setting maybe used as an antagonist, a reflection of an emotional emptiness, the source of atmosphere/mood, a metaphor for human life and a reinforcement of the story’s conflict.

In James Joyce’s short story, “Araby”, setting reflects the emotional emptiness of the boy narrator.

The imagery of the opening paragraph like in this sentence, “North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quite street except at the hour when the Christian Brother’s School set the boy’s free. An uninhabited house of two stories stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbors in a square ground” describes not only the loneliness between the neighbors but in particular the emotional emptiness of the boy.

Besides that, it shows a hidden symbol that love can or is blind. This blind love is exactly what the boy is going through from the stage of childhood to adulthood.

What Is Araby About

Another illustration which shows that the boy is trapped by his own emotional feelings is described in this sentence: “One evening I went into the back drawing-room in which the priest had died. It was a dark rainy-evening and there was no sound in the house. Through one of the broken panes I heard the rain impinge upon the earth, the fine incessant needles of water playing in the sodden beds.

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I was thankful that I could see so little.” The death of the priest, dark-rainy evening, no sound in the house, are all imagery to describe an atmospheric state of internal emptiness of the boy. The last sentence, where the boy was thankful to see so little, shows that it would have made his emotions worse when he had seen more of the room.

The boy’s emotional circumstances do not only last in the beginning of the story, but it is an incessant sentiment until the end when he arrives at the almost-closed bazaar.

“Nearly all the stalls where closed and the greater part of the hall was in darkness”, this again shows that the boy is still feeling the same way. He could not buy anything for the girl which even puts his emotional state more down.

“… my eyes burned with anguish and anger”, these are the last words of the short story which shows the reader that the boy’s feelings didn’t get better and that there is no happy ending for the boy but rather an increase of emotional emptiness.

The use of setting as an antagonist is another way of describing the situation of the story. The short story “The Chrysanthemums” written by John Steinbeck, uses this kind of setting like you can see in the first two sentences of the story: “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.” This already describes the atmosphere in which Elisa is living in; it is her own opponent.

The atmosphere in Elisa’s life is grim; there is “no sunshine in the valley now” and the air is “cold and tender” as it is described by the author in the story, showing again that setting can be adversary.

Later on, when Elisa looked back at the river road where the tinker had come from, she notices that “under a high gray fog” the willows look like ” a thin band of sunshine” Which means that the setting is still her opponent and only the road where the tinker came from is here only hope for freedom, “This was the only color in the grey afternoon”.

Setting can be used as a source of atmosphere and mood. Edgar Allen Poe uses this style of setting in the story ” The Fall of the House of Usher” to give the story its own unique atmosphere. It possesses the typical features of a Gothic tale: a haunted house, dreary landscape, mysterious sickness, and doubled personality (Madeline and Roderick). However, part of the terror of this story is its imprecision. We cannot say for sure where in the world or exactly when the story takes place. Instead of standard story writers of place and time, Poe uses elements such as inclement weather and a barren landscape.

The setting in this story plays an essential role because it establishes an atmosphere of dreariness, melancholy, and decay. The Usher family mansion is isolated and located in a “singularly dreary tract of country.” This style of setting, gives an atmosphere of horror to the reader. The house stirs up in the narrator “a sense of insufferable gloom,” and it is described as having “bleak walls,” and “vacant eye-like windows.” The interior of the house is equally desolate, with “vaulted and fretted ceilings”, “dark draperies hung upon the walls, and furniture that is “comfortless, antique and tattered.”

These all contribute to the mood which makes up the atmosphere of the story.

Edgar Allen Poe uses the narrator to describe the house so that the reader feels how dark and evil this place must be.

In the story “The Blind Man” written by D. H. Lawrence, setting is used as a source to reinforce the conflict of the story. The author uses imagery as an element to show the conflict to the readers. The relationship of Maurice and Isabel has begun to break down on Maurice’s dependency on her, an entirely reasonable one given the circumstances. When Maurice, while upstairs changing, hears Isabel and Bertie talking and feels “a childish sense of desolation”; he “seemed shut out…like a child that is left out.” But there is more to it than that, for it is clearly a feeling of dependency, which reinforces the conflict, rather than jealousy that distresses him:

“He had almost a childish nostalgia to be included in the life circle. And at the same time he was a man, dark and powerful and infuriated by his own weakness. By some fatal flaw, he could not be by himself, he had to depend on the support of another. And this very dependence enraged him.” Another perspective to look at the reinforcing of conflict is the house of Maurice. Even though he is blind, he still knows his surroundings, “He seemed to know the presence of objects before he touched them.

It was a pleasure to him to rock thus through a world of things…” This made him happy of his ability to “see” the objects but yet it tortured him inside: “then it would beat inside him like a tangled sea, and he was tortured in the shattered chaos of his own blood. He grew to dread this arrest, this throw-back, this chaos inside himself, when he seemed merely at the mercy of his own powerful and conflicting elements.” This sentence is showing the internal and external conflict of Maurice, which is in fact his scar and mostly his blindness that is making him feel despondent.

Bertie, whose own insufficiency has been described in terms of an “incurable weakness, which made him unable ever to enter into close contact of any sort”, in other words he fears intimacy especially with women, is the person whose conflict is shown later on at the barn outside the house.

As Maurice lays his hands on Bertie’s face and begins to touch him, he is able to transfer his own feeling of dependence, fear, sadness and anger onto Bertie. As a result, it is Bertie’s self-boundary that is destroyed. He is now the one who is terrified, shocked and speechless: ” Bertie could not answer. He gazed mute and terror-struck, overcome by his own weakness…he had an unreasonable fear lest the other man should suddenly destroy him…He could not bear it that he had been touched by the blind man, his insane reserve broken in. He was like a mollusk whose shell is broken”. Maurice in contrast was “filled with hot, poignant love, the passion of friendship.” Therefore Maurice seems to have overcome his own vulnerability and defeated his own conflict by transferring it onto another person and it seems that it is Bertie who is blind, not physically but mentally.

The author D.H. Lawrence gives us a complex imagery of isolated, perverted play, mechanical life and masturbation through the wooden horse in the story “The Rocking-Horse Winner” which leads to a compulsive drive for success in modern society. The short story is all in all a metaphor for human life. Instead of using literal imagery, with words like table, pots, glass, or finger, D.H. Lawrence preferred to use the figurative imagery consisting of comparisons to the real world in which we live. Thus, the style of setting used this time is a figurative imagery which shows the compulsive desire for so much money and can be therefore compared to reality.

The opening sentences of the story, which are similar to that of a fairy-tale, provides the reader with enough information to conclude that the mother has most likely a strong desire for wealth: “There was once a woman who was beautiful, who stated with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them.”

Another metaphor could be the haunted house which keeps on telling There must be more money, “And the children would stop playing to listen for a moment. They would look into each other’s eyes , to see if they had all heard. And each one saw in the eyes of the other two that they too had heard…” This can be related to reality in which the parents are not taking care of their children, not giving them love because they’re more concerned about their wealth, which eventually leads to the children taking action themselves in order to get their parent’s love.

The rocking horse represents both Paul’s desire to make money for his mother and his own sexuality. In a sense, one can guess that Paul compensates for his mother’s immaturity by masturbating: “…he would sit on his big rocking horse, charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made the little girls peer at him uneasily…his eyes had a strange glare in them” Paul’s masturbatory activities are equally useless as well. No matter how much money he wins for his mother, she is never satisfied. More to the point, Paul’s money can not buy his mother’s love.

All in all, setting is not only the time and place of a story but it can be sometimes an essential part of the story. The emotional emptiness in “Araby” by James Joyce, “The Chrysanthemums” by John Steinbeck which uses antagonism, mood and atmosphere in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe, reinforcement of the conflict in “The Blind Man” and “The Rocking Horse Winner” which is a metaphor for human life. All 5 are good examples of how setting plays an important and different role in a story. The setting of a story helps to outline the general theme. It may even be an important symbol or help develop symbolism. Setting may also able a reader to relate to hardships or situations in real life. This helps the story to become more powerful and complex. The settings used in the 5 stories above were the foundations of success in these works.