Inside the House of the Spirits and the Story of Zahra, Isabel Allende and Hanan al-Shaykh establish the setting through their use of point of view and narrative technique and parallelism. Allende uses two different types of point of view to tell his story, first person and third person. They differ in the way he presents them because the first-person point of view comes from Esteban Trueba, whose thoughts come directly from experiencing the story, while the third-person point of view comes from an unknown source who only read the story through diary entries. . Al-Shaykh uses point of view differently because he shows multiple first-person points of view. The change of point of view in literature affects how the reader can perceive the setting in which the character finds himself. Allende and al-Shaykh use narrative technique to show that the characters are all different in the way they describe a setting. The differences are seen by the reader through the feelings the character experiences and through the specific diction that both authors use. Both authors also use parallelism to demonstrate that their characters can reflect the setting. This essay will compare the ways in which both authors create setting through the above techniques. Allende and al-Shaykh both use point of view in different ways to establish setting. Al-Shaykh creates the setting of Africa through three different first-person points of view while Allende does so through the contrast between a first-person point of view and an omniscient third person. From Zahra's point of view, coming to Africa without ever having lived there before affects that environment because everything is new to her, so she makes assumptions, "...a narrow corridor, full of televisions, radios and records, stacked on shelves up to the ceiling. When I saw them for the first time, I was afraid that they might fall on my head..." (al-Shaykh, 1986, p.20). uncle because she feels trapped in Africa with no way out. Her thoughts on the fall of “televisions, radios and records” show that this is a new environment because it is not something she has seen before. The use of the third person Allende's omniscient is contrasted with al-Shaykh's use of first-person point of view because Allende conveys the story through a character who tells the story through diary entries, "...Clara understood that there 'there was a place for her in Tres Marias and, as she wrote in her notebooks, she felt she had finally discovered her mission in life.