Setting In The Birds And The Veldt

One of the most important aspects in a good short story is setting. Setting is the time and place that in which a short story occurs in. Authors use setting for three reasons, to create the mood, cause or influence actions and reveal characters. In The Birds by Daphne de Maurier and The Veldt by Ray Bradbury, the authors use setting to create a distinctive mood and reveal the characters within their respective stories.
In The Birds, De Maurier paints a grim, isolated, and hopeless mood. Birds in the story are “‘attacking anyone on sight” and “have already begun an assault upon buildings” (11). This in turn creates a grim mood, since the birds are threatening the lives of people in England by attacking them continuously. More importantly, this …show more content…
Nat and his family are completely alone, and if the attacks continue, death is imminent, and that what happened to Nat’s dead neighbors would happen to them as well. De Maurier hints at the fact that everyone around Nat and his family are dead, as “all of the windows of [the neighbors] farmhouse were smashed” (16). This creates further isolation, as Nat and his family don’t even have neighbors to help defend them anymore. Instead, Nat is surrounded by dead bodies, smashed houses, and not a single person who can aid them. Nat and his family are totally isolated, without any hope, and everyone around them dead. This mood is directly created by the setting, which is part of what makes The Birds such a good short story.
In The Veldt, Ray Bradbury uses a “Nursery” as a setting. This nursery can directly create what someone imagines, giving the reader a direct insight into the mind of Peter (one of the main characters), who has tampered with the nursery so it can only display what he wants. The setting directly reveals the thoughts of Peter. The Nursery was described as a brutally hot and bloody African Veldt, with “The yellows of lions and summer grass, and the sound of the matted lion lungs exhaling on the silent noontide, and the

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