Anton Chekhov's Allegorical Tale of Human Nature "A Story Without a Title" Means Explaining How Setting Does Little or Nothing to change our most fundamental human desires, that we want to accumulate wealth, live in the present moment and please our body, without worrying too much about our soul. He uses setting to convey his message using settings such as time, place and society. A possible symbolic setting of the story is created in the first sentence of the story "In the fifth century, as today." We now know that they lived a long time ago and this might suggest that he wishes to show parallels of characteristics between contemporary readers and the characters set in the 5th century plot. The fact that Chekhov wrote “Just Like Today” further shows the parallels between then and today. This suggests that Chekhov is addressing a timeless theme: the town and the monastery exist as two different entities with no way of knowing how the other functions. This is reinforced by the great distance that separates them and the arid land that separates them. “To reach the monastery one had to travel more than seventy miles through the desert.” “That” being the city. To further emphasize: “Only men who despised life, who had renounced it, and who came to the monastery as to the tomb, risked crossing the desert. » This means that the monastery and the city are completely independent of each other. Any idea or theory about the city is determined solely by the imagination of the monks of the monastery. The same goes for the townspeople and what they know about the monastery. The physical setting of the story therefore shows a separation between town, monastery and town. There is then a symbolic separation between the center...... middle of paper...... it appears that the two groups of people obey the same laws of hedonistic behavior where the primary concern of life is to appease the senses Chekhov manages here to convey the message of an underlying human desire to satisfy the hedonistic desires of the senses because, even though the monks never touched, smelled, tasted, heard, saw or perceived the city of whatever way they did, they still wanted to appease him. their hedonistic desires just like the people of the city. They want to travel to the city where all of this is possible, even though they have never been there or satisfied their senses the way city residents do. This is the timeless theme that Chekhov is trying to convey. In a sense, the grass is always greener on the other side and people will always try to achieve more than they need to appease their senses. Works Cited Anton Chekhov, An Untitled Story