Literary Interior

The interior in literature is an artistic description of the inner appearance of a room, the setting, and the objects among which the characters live and act — a means of the indirect characterization of a hero, his social standing, tastes, psychology, and way of life. Through the description of a dwelling, objects, and everyday details the writer reveals a person's inner world: the interior 'speaks' of its owner. Objects in a literary work often acquire a symbolic significance and become signs of fate, character, and era. The interior creates a lifelike milieu, heightens the atmosphere of the action, and deepens the realism or, conversely, the conventionality of what is depicted. Detailed everyday interiors are characteristic of realist prose, where they reproduce the social coloring; for example, descriptions of peasant dwellings in Ukrainian realist prose of the nineteenth century reproduce the conditions of folk life. The interior, like the portrait and the landscape, belongs to the extra-plot descriptive elements that enrich the fictional world of a work and heighten the conviction of the depiction of reality.