Transience, Time, and Place
Ruthie never mentioned when the story takes place, and Fingerbone is not actually a real town. However, you can probably trace the setting pretty well - Wikipedia helpfully mentions that the book Ruthie reads, Not as a Stranger, was written in 1954. And I assume it’s not taking place after 1980, when the book was published. In a sense it’s nice to know where the book takes place, so maybe those hours I spend procrastinating on Google Maps can be spent in relation to at least one class. Anyway, here's what Finerbone probably looks like. But upon trying to figure out where the book takes place and when and whatnot, I started thinking if that even matters. Obviously, since it’s not all that hard to figure out and place names are mentioned, it’s not exactly that Robinson’s intention is to hide the location of the story to illuminate something specific. But the setting isn’t emphasized,and Robinson also depicts how miniscule human life is in the scale of geologic time, making all hum...