With any setting of any fictional book one thing is for certain, the people, places, and actions within the novel are completely made up. Thomas C. Foster explains this obvious fact more clearly in his book, How to Read Novels like a Professor. Foster states that in every fictional novel, “Is a made-up work about made up-people in a made-up place” (37). Even though all of these attributes to a fictional novel are just whipped up out of thin air, Foster says that the reader must still be expected to treat the fiction of the novel as true fact. Foster also goes on to state that, “Places in a work of fiction are never real but must behave as real” (42).
In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s fictional novel, Crime and Punishment, the main setting is in Saint Petersburg Russia. Although this is a very real city with real people that live there, the citizens within the novel cease to exist. Their actions, physical features, and personalities are all fictional. The author uses an actual city in Russia to aid the reader and try to make his story and plot more believable even though it is a work of fiction. The author also uses the setting to help us believe the characters as individuals as well. If the setting and characters are relatable to the reader then they will be able to believe in everything that occurs within the novel more easily. The detail that Dostoevsky puts into the description of the setting is very vivid and remarkably accurate making the rest of the story very believable. The author states that, “The heat in the street was terrible: and the airlessness, the bustle, the plaster, the scaffolding, the bricks and the dust all around him, and the special Petersburg stench, so familiar to everyone that is unable to get out of town for the summer”(6). The crowded streets of Saint Petersburg irritate the main character. Even though the main character already has, “overwrought nerves” (6), the reader is still able to understand through the busy and overcrowded setting why he would become so nervous about life. The setting of Crime and Punishment is completely falsified, but is also very real not only to the story itself but also to the reader. Like Thomas Foster said in, How to Read Novels like a Professor, “Readers participate in the creation of these fictional worlds, filling in the gaps in description, seizing on details, making the possible world actual in imagination, agreeing, for a little while, to inhabit the uninhabitable”(44).
-Conner Furr
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