The Influence of Setting in the Development of Plot in Eugene O’Neil’s Anna Christie

Abstract

The thesis concerns the elements involving the knowledge about the place an action in a play takes place; the setting. The discussion is based mainly on the dominant setting, the sea. Besides many other places set in it, the dialogues circulate in sea as the setting in most of the play’s length. In the discussion, the writer tries to explore the possibility that there is a constant interaction between the setting used by Eugene O’Neill and the development of the plot. The writer uses the objective approach because the topic of the research is about one of the elements of the play that is the setting which cannot be liberated from the other elements such as the plot or the character. The manuscript of the play will be treated as it is structurally. This means that the play is treated as a composition of three main elements; the characters, the settings, and the plot, which are related one another. From the three main elements, the writer can find that the setting had influenced the development of the plot. The writer chooses to put certain characters in certain setting to construct a certain altitude of series of actions. The series of actions will form climaxes and anti-climaxes that build up the plot of the play. In other words, the relation of each element to the others forms a unity that will make us see the primary idea of the play. The deductive method is chosen by the writer because the analysis moves from a general idea into specific ideas. In the discussion we can say the manuscript of the drama is the general idea. The writer then separates the elements of the manuscript of the drama such as the setting and the character to become the specific idea. The details are then described to make it possible for us to see their relation with the other element of the play, the plot. Finally we come to the conclusion that in the drama, we can find that the setting which is the sea had become the resolution of the main character’s problem. At the end of the drama we can see that Anna finally takes her destiny to become a wife of a Sailor which has to spend most of their life at Sea.