AP Lit Skill Spotlight: Character & Setting

As I said when we tackle this skill in poetry, taking the step from identifying setting to analyzing setting is the mark of an AP-ready student. Once they have started considering the function and significance of a text’s setting, the next step is analyzing the link between a text’s setting and its relationship with a character.

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Warm-Up Activity: Studying Character & Setting in Pixar

Pixar specializes in making beautiful movies. Not only are the stories fantastic, but they are often visually spectacular. Because of this, they are great for study of character and setting. Check out these 3 Pixar clips and after showing each, ask students to consider the relationship between the setting and the characters.

Finding Nemo

In this scene, Nemo grows tired of his father’s constant coddling and worrying. When Marlin tries to explain to Nemo’s teacher that the dropoff is too dangerous, Nemo recklessly swims out to see (very near the same place where his mother died). Nemo attempts to prove his bravery, but instead is taken by a diver, solidifying Marlin’s warnings that the ocean is a very dangerous place. What is the relationship between Nemo and the setting? What about Marlin and the setting?

Focus Text:

One of my favorite texts for teaching the relationship between character and setting is from the 2009 exam. This excerpt is from Ann Petry’s novel, The Street. Click here to access the excerpt (on page 3) or download the file below. Then, pose the following questions to your students:

1. Where is this story set? Describe the setting with textual details.
2. Who is the protagonist? Describe her and make inferences based on the text.
3. What is the relationship between Lutie and aspects of the setting?
4. What is the relationship between Lutie and the society or culture of this setting?

Teacher’s Guide

1. This excerpt takes place on a street on a windy November day on 116^th Street in New York City. The street is dirty, partly because of the wind but also likely because of its urban nature. The author describes the street lined with garbage and pork-chop bones and having signs ruined by weather and rust.
2. The protagonist is Lutie Johnson, a young woman hunting for an apartment. We don’t get much description of her character, but her tireless pursuit of an apartment, one with three bedrooms, not two, shows us she is perseverant and determined.
3. Lutie is our protagonist, but in this excerpt the wind that dominates the setting is the antagonist. It is even described like a predator, saying that it lifted her hair away until she felt naked. Later, the wind’s cold fingers touch and explore her body. The wind also acts as an obstacle between Lutie and her future home. It pushes the sign away from her, making it difficult to read it.  
4. When analyzing this text, it’s clear that the setting seems oppositional to Lutie. It’s as if everything is set against her, down to the wind and the street itself. In the full novel, we learn that Lutie Johnson is a young single mother, searching for a new home for herself and her children. The story is set during World War II in Harlem, New York, so life for a single mother would be difficult. Compound that with the fact that Lutie Johnson is black and it’s clear that the world would seem in opposition with Lutie. However, this text illustrates her perseverance in the face of all this opposition. What before was just an overactive wind becomes a personified force, representing the world’s resistence to Lutie.

Additional Text Suggestions for Narrator Reliability

Here is a list of additional short stories and novels that you can use to help students study the relationship between a character and a text’s setting. To work for Short Fiction units, I suggest limiting the novels to excerpts of 1-10 pages. Thank you to the AP Lit Facebook community for help in cultivating this list!

Short Texts:

• “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway (used in my Skill Spotlight for 2.B, identifying setting)
• “Good People” by David Foster Wallace

Longer Works:

• Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
• The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
• Atonement by Ian McEwan
• The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey