Setting
Like his previous works, Ham on Rye is set in Los Angeles, where the author grew up. Bukowski keeps his descriptions of his hometown grounded in its reality, paying more attention to the people that make up Los Angeles than to the city itself. This type of description does not venerate or idealize the city, a contrast to other so-called "Los Angeles Novels". Scenes outside of Los Angeles show Chinaski as an intruder, as with an early scene where he and his family are chased out of an orange grove. The story takes place at home, his different schools, the doctors, and around his town.
Read more about this topic: Ham On Rye
Famous quotes containing the word setting:
“With wonderful art he grinds into paint for his picture all his moods and experiences, so that all his forces may be brought to the encounter. Apparently writing without a particular design or responsibility, setting down his soliloquies from time to time, taking advantage of all his humors, when at length the hour comes to declare himself, he puts down in plain English, without quotation marks, what he, Thomas Carlyle, is ready to defend in the face of the world.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Dandyism is the last flicker of heroism in decadent ages.... Dandyism is a setting sun; like the declining star, it is magnificent, without heat and full of melancholy. But alas! the rising tide of democracy, which spreads everywhere and reduces everything to the same level, is daily carrying away these last champions of human pride, and submerging, in the waters of oblivion, the last traces of these remarkable myrmidons.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“The world is ... the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not “inhabit” only “the inner man,” or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world, and only in the world does he know himself.”
—Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1907–1961)