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:
“something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms-house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring. I do not see but a quiet mind may live as contentedly there, and have as cheering thoughts, as in a palace.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We don’t arrive at it by standing on one leg or on the first day of our setting out—but though we may jostle one another on the way that is no reason why we should strike or trample—elbowing’s enough.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)