Job History - Annie Proulx

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Choose a novel in which the setting in time and/or place is a significant feature.

Show how the writer’s use of setting contributes to your understanding of character

and theme.

In the short story “Job History” Annie Proulx uses its mid-western setting to explore key aspects of theme and characterisation. It tells of fifty years of the life and tribulations of a man named Leeland Lee set against the harsh backdrop of Wyoming life in mid-western America.

Proulx's fiction has a habit of bestowing less than ordinary names upon its everyday people. In “Job History”, this extends to the name places. “Unique” is the town in which Leeland is raised and perhaps the reader should go beyond an ironic interpretation and view it as a central component of her fiction - that no two lives are identical despite how recogniseable they may be.  The blankness of the story's title is replicated in her unemotional prose which adopts the style and tone of a newsreader and this device underlines the notion that the town's name symbolises. It lends equal weight to both the minor and major events in his life - the tragedies, the joys and the everyday.  Most noticeably we see it in the closing stage of  Leeland's life;

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“Leeland hurts his back and in the same week Lori learns that she has breast cancer and is pregnant again”

 By the story's close we recognise and remember Leeland's life as “Unique”.

Another notable use of setting that Proulx employs is by showing the encroachment of the federal highway system upon Wyoming life. Proulx chooses to coin “Highway 16” as the road that is superseded by the new road four miles south of it.   It should be noted Proulx has clearly used a reversal of the famous Highway 61 – a road  that begins in Wyoming ...

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