The story has only one setting, the unnamed streets of an unnamed New York City neighborhood. While the author withholds these specific details, the anonymous nature of the city environs suits his purpose to emphasize the main themes of the passage of time and the possibility of change. The anonymous aspects also reflect the story's recurring motif of indistinguishable identity that provides its suspense and climactic undoing. The narrator never names the city, but Bob references his and Jimmy's upbringing “here in New York” (215), making clear and marking as essential information the otherwise nondescript locale.

O. Henry is an innovator of the fictional storytelling conventions that became standard forms of structural, dramatic and moral content. The urban setting, character-types (cops and robbers) and dramatic finish that O. Henry is famous for combine to create what has since come to be known as a “New York story...