Periphrases are divided into

The Functions of Setting
Setting in fiction is called on to perform a number of desired functions. These functions must not, however, be thought of as mutually exclusive. In many works of fiction, setting can and does perform a number of different functions simultaneously.


POINT OF VIEW
A story must have a plot, characters and a setting. It must also have a storyteller: a narrative voice, real or implied, that presents the story to the reader. When we talk about narrative voice, we are talking about point of view, the method of narration that determines the position, or angle of vision from which the story is told. The nature of the relationship between the narrator and the story, the teller and the tale, is always crucial to the art of fiction. It governs the reader’s access to the story and determines how much he can know at any given moment about what is taking place. So crucial point of view that, once having been chosen, it will colour and shape the way in which everything else is presented and perceived, including plot, character and setting. Alter or change the point of view, and you alter and change the story.
The choice of point of view is the choice of who is to tell the story, who talks to the reader. It may be a narrator outside the work (omniscient point of view); a narrator inside the work, telling the story from a limited omniscient or first-person point of view; or apparently no one (dramatic point of view). As we will see in the subsequent discussion, these four basic points of view, and their variations, involve the distance that the author is wishing to maintain between the reader and the story and the extent to which the author is willing to involve the reader in its interpretation. As the author moves away from omniscience along this spectrum of choices, he progressively surrenders the ability to see into the minds of his characters.


THEME
Theme is one of those critical terms that mean very different things to different people. To some, who think of literature mainly as a vehicle for teaching, preaching, propaganding a favorite idea, or encouraging some form of correct conduct, theme may mean the moral or lesson that can be extracted from the work, as with one of Aesop’s fables or Parson Weems’ famous (and, sadly, apocryphal) story about George Washington and the cherry tree. Theme is also used sometimes to refer to the basic issue, problem or subject with which the work is concerned: for example, “the nature of man”, “the discovery of truth”, or “the brotherhood of man”. In this sense, a number of stories included in this anthology – Sherwood Anderson’s I want to know why, James Joyce’s Araby, Katherine Anne Porter’s The Grave, and John Updike’s A&P may also be said to deal in common with the theme of initiation, the rite of passage into the world of adulthood. Or, we may speak of theme as a familiar pattern or motif that occurs again and again in literature, say the journey theme found in works as different and similar as John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s My Kinsman, Major Molineux, and Flannery O’Connor’s The Artificial Nigger.
When we speak of theme in connection with critical analysis of a literary work, however, we usually have a broader and more inclusive definition in mind. In literature, the theme is the central idea or statement about life that unifies and controls the total work. By this definition, then, the theme is not the issue, or problem, or subject with which the work deals, as violence is the subject of Stephen Crane’s “The Blue Hotel”. Rather, the theme is the comment or statement the author makes about that subject as it necessarily and inevitably emerges from the interplay of the various elements of the work.

A symbol, according to Webster’s Dictionary, is “something that stands for or suggests something else by reason of relationship, association, convention, or accidental resemblance…a visible sign of something invisible”. Symbols, in this sense, are with us all the time, for there are few words or objects that do not evoke, at least in certain contexts, a wide range of associated meanings and feelings. For example, the word home (as opposed to house conjures up feelings of warmth and security and personal associations of family, friends, and neighborhood, while the American flag suggests country and patriotism. Human beings by virtue of their capacity for language are symbol-making creatures.

Most of our daily symbol-making and symbol-reading is unconscious and accidental, the inescapable product of our experience as human-beings. In literature, however, symbols – in the form of words, images, objects, settings, events and characters – are often used deliberately to suggest and reinforce meaning, to provide enrichment by enlarging and clarifying the experience of the work, and to help to organize and unify the whole. William York Tindall likens a literary symbol to “a metaphor one half of which remains unstated and indefinite”. The analogy is a good one. Although symbols exist first as something literal and concrete within the work itself, they also have the capacity to call to mind a range of invisible and abstract associations, both intellectual and emotional, that transcend the literal and concrete and extend their meaning. A literary symbol brings together what is material and concrete within the work (the visible half of Tinsdall’s metaphor) with its series of associations (that “which remains unstated and indefinite”); by fusing them, however briefly, in the reader's imagination, new layers and dimensions of meaning, suggestiveness, and significance are added.
Symbols are often classified as being traditional, original, or private, depending on the source of the associations that provide their meanings.