lecture takes the audience to different places. For example, Pausch's lecture revisits his childhood home, specifically his room and his family's dining room table. Randy takes the audience to Disney World, different computer lab settings, and North Carolina to meet his future wife. However, the primary setting forThe Last Lecture is the lecture hall on the campus of Carnegie Mellon University.

In literature, a conflict can be defined as any struggle between two opposites; most often, the protagonist struggles against the antagonist. Since a conflict is a struggle, or a fight, we can easily describe conflicts as something vs. something else. Common conflicts include character vs. character, character vs. society, character vs. nature, and character vs. self.
Randy Pausch uses the non-fiction work The Last Lecture, as well as the lecture the book was based off of, to teach his audience how to overcome obstacles in order to fulfill childhood dreams. Hence, one dominant conflict found in the work can be considered character vs. obstacles; sometimes those obstacles have to do with nature; sometimes they have to do with society.

The first obstacle the reader learns about concerns the fact that Pausch has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and has only three months left to live. He also still has a lot to live for, including a strong career, three children, and a loving wife. Hence, since Pausch's cancer is impeding him from doing what he wants to continue doing, his cancer also serves as a conflict. Plus, since cancer and death are natural occurrences, we can say that the conflict is character vs. nature.

The conflict of character vs. society is also revealed through the stories he uses in his lecture to instruct his students on how to fulfill childhood dreams. For example, one of his dreams was to achieve weightlessness in space. He partially fulfilled this goal by working with a team to create a simulation aimed at helping people overcome nausea experienced during weightlessness. However, fully achieving his goal was also temporarily thwarted when his university would not permit faculty to enter the simulator; only journalists and students could enter the simulator. He overcame this obstacle by quitting his job and being hired as a journalist. Hence, the university's decision to forbid faculty from entering the simulator also serves as a conflict, and since a university is a part of society, we can call this conflict character vs. society.

Throughout the book, many other obstacles he speaks of overcoming also have to do with society, so many other conflicts are also character vs. society.

There is no single, overall "setting" for The Last Lecture, since it is a non-fiction book about cancer victim Randy Pausch's last months and an expansion of the literal "last lecture" that he delivered at Carnegie Mellon University. In that sense, the setting could be said to be "in Pausch's life," or at the actual lecture that inspired the book. As the book goes into far more detail about Pausch's life than the lecture itself did, that can be said to be a better candidate for setting; if speaking about the lecture itself, titled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," the setting would be the McConomy Auditorium at CMU.

Pausch spent his last months with his family, preparing for the lecture and trying to acclimate his children and wife to the idea of continuing after his death. They moved to Virginia, near his wife's family, where they continue to live. Throughout the book, Pausch explains how his childhood and life informed his later decisions, and his interactions with his wife are arguably the most emotional portions. Pausch intended the book to be a celebration of life, not a condemnation of death, and so he invites readers to remember the positives in their own lives. The setting of Pausch's entire life, instead of an isolated portion of it, allows the reader greater revelations about his attitudes towards life. Pausch refused to be suppressed by his cancer, giving versions of his talk until his death, and even appeared in the 2009 blockbuster film Star Trek.

Randy Pausch was invited to present his "last lecture" at Carnegie Mellon University after it became generally known that his pancreatic cancer had progressed to a terminal stage. Carnegie Mellon has a tradition of inviting respected instructors to consider their life and work and present a "last lecture" based on the message(s) they would want to deliver if they knew this was the final lecture of their career.

Pausch's presentation was delivered on September 18, 2007 at Carnegie Mellon to a standing-room-only audience of students and associates from his academic career, which included a position as a professor of computer science, design, and human-computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon among other positions.

The speech, which Pausch entitled "Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams," reviewed life lessons he had gleaned from failures that were reframed as opportunities which allowed him to enjoy experiences that had started as dreams. While the lessons were relevant for the collegiate-level audience at the lecture, Pausch reveals in his closing that the content of the message was actually directed toward his three young children, since he knew he wouldn't be alive to help them overcome obstacles in their lives.

Randy Pausch died July 25, 2008.