Jeffery's Short Story 'It Had To Be Murder'

In the short story “It Had to Be Murder,” the many entities, atmosphere, and sentence structure present contribute to the overall purpose of the setting - to evict a sense of significance over the most miniscule of things. “I could get from the bed to the window and the window to the bed and that was all,” a sentence near the beginning of the story serves to depict that the life of the protagonist is very monotonous and repetitive and Jeff experiences are confined only to his bedroom. However, throughout the story, Jeffery is depicted as doing everything but that; from being the witness of a murder and assisting the police on the crime which he is the only one to have witnessed. It is as almost if his bedroom represented the humans being isolated

Not only does the pulling down and pulling up the shades evoke curiosity and suspicion, they symbolize a barrier which, in the case of a story, is used to restrict prying eyes from a murder. Finally and most importantly, the layout of the apartment complex itself serves to portray that even the most perplexing events can occur in the most elementary of places. In the introduction, Jeffery describes his apartment complex and the his neighbors. “The next house down, the windows already narrowed a little with perspective… The third one down no longer offered any insight… It was a flat building,” are all his interpretations which are describing what exists in his life is very simple (the grid-like shape of the flats) and serves very little interest. But as the story progressives, details about the life of many of Jeffrey’s neighbors are revealed and show how they are being hidden by the apparent straightforward design and layout of the apartment complex. All in all, the setting is meticulously set which requires a little elaboration and thinking to reveal it’s true purpose - to mask significant and perhaps even dangerous parts of people's