Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" and Carver's "The Popular Mechanics" both use setting to develop their theme. The marital relationship breaks down if the spouses do not truly love each other. Both stories have similar settings, as they both enter the social environment of a relationship, but some contents of each story's setting have differences. The theme of each story is conveyed by the setting, such as social environments and time, of the story. In “The Story of an Hour,” Chopin, the author, uses 1900 to convey the theme of the story. In "Popular Mechanics", Carver, the author, uses two different settings to develop the theme. In summary, the settings of "The Story of an Hour" and "Popular Mechanics" help convey the theme. The setting of "The Story of an Hour" and "Popular Mechanics" both address the social environment of a couple's relationship. For example, "Story of an Hour" tells of a wife named Mrs. Millard, who has heart disease, who learns that her husband had died in a train accident from the lips of her sister Josephine. But Mrs. Millard reacts in a different, very confused way. "As she let herself go, a little whispered word escaped her slightly parted lips. She repeated it over and over under her breath: "free, free, free!" (Chopin 15). Instead of feeling sorrow over her husband's death, she jumps into a state of joy as freedom enters his life. Similarly, in “Popular Mechanics,” the couple struggles through a relationship “He was in the bedroom shoving clothes into a suitcase when she came to the door. I'm happy you're leaving! I'm happy you're leaving! He said. Did you hear that?" (Carver 264). Although it is never known whether the couple was married, the social environment in the relationship between the two individuals was argumentative and ends in the collapse of the relationship, as in the case of Mrs. Millard's affair with her husband. In short, the settings of "Story of an Hour" and "Popular Mechanics" demonstrate the similar collapse of each couple's relationship Even though "Story of an Hour" and "Popular Mechanics" have similar settings in the stories , there are differences in the setting of each story. For example, in “The Story of an Hour,” the setting is set somewhere in 1900 during the day. “There were patches of blue sky showing here and there through the clouds that had met and piled one above the other in the west, opposite his window" (Chopin 15).