Setting can either make or break a short story, while at other times it is completely irrelevant. A good juxtaposition of a story using setting to its advantage and another story where setting is practically irrelevant is “Welding with Children” and “The Lottery.” In “Welding with Children” Tim Gautreaux uses the setting of a man’s messy yard to show how messy the man’s life actually is. In cleaning up his yard he begins to clean up not only his life but his family's. In this instance setting is very important. In “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson the events that take place have no concurrence with the setting in which the story takes place. The town members draw from a box every year to see who will be stoned. While the event is horrific and should not be happening, it happens in every town. The specific location plays no role in the outcome of the story. The setting of the story can either be extremely important or simply irrelevant to the story depending of the message it intends to convey. Setting plays an extremely large role in “Welding with Children.” The Man, who is the main character, slowly begins to realize that his life is in shambles. He realizes that the way he raised his children has led to the corrupt way his children have raised his grandchildren. He says, “It’s time for a change I guess" (Gautreaux 125), realizing that without a change his grandchildren will have the same fate the rest of the family had, going nowhere. Cleaning up his yard, the main setting of the story, was the start in his many efforts to help and change the way his grandchildren viewed life. He was told by a respected man in town to “clean" (Gautreaux 105) his yard up. This hit him in a deep way, realizing that the town had formed opinions of his family and life. He knew the only way to change this was to take action and clean up his yard (life). The man had once said, “I formed a little fantasy about gathering all th