Setting

The short story “Tomorrow Is Too Far” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria and the US in two different time periods—when the narrator is 10 years old, and when she is 28 years old. However, we do not know the specific years. However, it is likely that the past events of the story take place in the 1970s or 1980s, as this was a time when the hippy movement became popular (the narrator’s father attends a Black Arts festival in the woods without telephones or radios). The fact that the narrator is embarrassed by the fact that mother later lives in a commune in California suggests that these ideas have since gone out of f…

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Physical setting

The physical setting includes only a few references to the US such as the “cold cemetery in Virginia with tombstones jutting out obscenely” (p. 27, ll. 36-37) where Nonso is buried or the fact that the narrator’s mother lives in a commune and the narrator lives in New York.  Most of the narration is focused on the physical setting of the grandmother’s house in Nigeria, seen through the narrator’s eyes as a child and as an adult:

…Grandmama’s …

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Social setting

The social setting conveys aspects related to family relationships, parental favoritism, Nigerian culture, superstitions, girls’ position in society, sexuality, grief, guilt, and regret.

The narrator’s parents illustrate aspects about inter-cultural relationships as the mother is African-American and the father is a Nigerian artist. The father is a distant, absent figure and this is probably something that contributes to the parents’ divorce, apart from their son’s death.

Both parents—the mother in particular—seem to favor their son more than their daughter, making the narrator feel excluded and rejected as a child. The divorce and the mother’s attitude towards the narrator, her husband and her mother-in-law after Nonso’s death illustrates how th…