Through The Tunnel Setting

Do you believe that a place can mean something more? The story through the tunnel talks about a little boy that goes to a beach with his mother, where he discovers a tunnel that at the end of the summer will mean something more. In through the tunnel, Doris Lessing demonstrates that a setting can influence a character, how the setting can also create a conflict and how imagery help us to imagine better the story.

When a little boy goes to the beach with his mother he sees a promontory so he decides to check it out. When he arrives he sees an older boys playing around so he decides to come closer, but the little boy discovers something about them. “Soon the biggest boy dove into the water, and did not come up. The others watched. Jerry waited, scared. After a long time, the boy came up of the other side of a big dark rock. The rest of them dived in. Through the heavy blue water, dark shapes moved”. Here Doris show us the setting that is a shore and it has tunnel, where older boys dive in and she also introduces how the little boy feels about it. Thanks to the imagery Doris helps us to visualize how is the water where the boys dive in “heavy blue water”. So in this fragment we see how imagery works and how the setting starts to affect the character.

The little boy saw the boys diving into the
“After a time, his heart slow down, and he sat up. He could see the local boys diving and playing half a mile away. He did not want them. He only wanted to get home and lie down.” In this final point of the story we see how the older boys of the beginning of the story are near the little boy but he didn’t care anymore about them. Here we can see how does the little boy’s mind changed, in the beginning of the story he would love being with the older boys but in the end he doesn’t want them anymore. Something changed his mind, the tunnel changed