A Sunrise on a Veld by Doris Lessing - Realization of the Cruelty of Nature on a Winter Morning

Realization of the Cruelty of Nature on a Winter Morning

Just as a dictionary simply explains, setting is a particular place of a type of surroundings where something is or takes place. To reflect on the word a little bit deeper and place it specifically into the realm of creative writing, it can easily be deduced that the setting of a story or even a novel provides particularly a place, a stage or a space and time for something to happen or for someone to take actions. Human beings are visually inclined and thus constantly affected from what they see in their surroundings. Consequently, in a sense, the setting in a story or novel can exert its psychological influence upon the characters and even facilitate the maturity of the mind of the characters in the story or novel.

The whole setting in the short story A Sunrise on a Veld written by Doris Lessing well serves the above function. Lessing tells of a story about a fifteen-year-old boy from the African grassland who thought at the very beginning that he was powerful and energetic and could do anything and get everything controlled with his tenacious will. Determined to train himself to be strong against the cold winter morning, he decided to rise early from bed without his parents’ mere knowledge. Despite the coldness and darkness of winter dawn, he prided himself to beat the harsh winter morning: he ran wild through the woods and grassland and tried to hunt.

He thought he could conquer the winter cold and even the Mother Nature until he saw a horrible scene: an injured buck was eaten away by a mound of ants. The remaining skeleton of the buck left without the slightest flesh by the tiny avid ants shocked the young boy as he could not save it. Such a scene trapped the boy in that he found himself powerless. A buck, a thousand times bigger in size than the ant, could have been eaten alive by the tiny ants, and yet he could not do anything at all. The nature’s power and cruelty confused him, belittled him and urged himself to further study it as a result of his realization that he could not be a whole controlling master of nature. This can be deemed as the boy’s great leap of understanding of nature and maturity of his mind, both of which the setting or the surroundings help develop.

As is shown above, the setting helps with the maturity of the mind of the boy. But what is the setting for sure in A Sunrise on a Veld? It is easy enough to find out. In separating what the young boy did, all that is left can be roughly seen as setting. To be exact, the time frame is the early winter morning with still darkness and without sunrise yet; the space ranges from the home,

the woods, the grassland and to the river miles away from the home. The setting is step by step presented with the young boy’s running out from the house. What the boy saw around along his way of hunting excited him and offered him a sense of immense power and valor to do anything and conquer, a sense that no longer stayed with him when the horrible scene of the buck entered into his mind.

Actions are the bones while the setting is the flesh, which Lessing shall without doubt agree about. Lessing is a master with skills to depict the setting with great detail from the house to the very river near which place the horrible scene occurred: when the boy stealthily came out the low and small house which he soon found “crouching there under a tall and brilliant sky”, the sky promised no sign of sunrise but was dotted with “dimming” star that signified the earliness of the winter morning. The boy walked fast through the foliage of the bush, dogs running for pleasure, then ran along a field where spider webs hanged over, then a farm under a satiny sky, and then stopped at the riverside; he aroused the a flock of birds, watched “small rosy clouds” floating high, and ran, leapt up, sang and yelled with excitement knowing that he was alone disturbing the early winter morning and savoring its beauty and vigor.

All those the boy saw along the road are what Lessing carefully wrote and they intensifies the boy’s pride and confidence to be a young boy. However, with a sound of pain the boy heard began a totally different and cruel setting. The warm and sweet setting was gone as the bloody slaughter of a suffering buck by ants drew the attention of the boy: the disappearing and reappearing black ants savored the flesh of the buck with rustling and whispering sound; then the flesh of the buck was eaten away completely and the black ants mound became small. Here what Lessing depicted about the cruel eating scene surrenders the boy into the madness, self-doubt and powerlessness, an important part of the whole setting that contributes to the boy’s understanding of nature and his urge for further search for it.

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