As I Lay Dying And Babylon Revisited: A Literary Analysis

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The American stock market took a turn for the worse in 1929. This infamous crash left many Americans monetarily starved. This is poverty is seen in stories such as As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner and “Babylon Revisited” by F. Scott Fitzgerald. However, Americans were poor long before the Great Depression. The Modernist movement, which started at the end of the First World War, showed how postwar Americans experienced an absence. In As I Lay Dying and “Babylon Revisited”, the theme of poverty is used to represent the absence that Americans were feeling during the Modernist movement. As I Lay Dying wastes no time in telling readers that the Bundrens are poor. The story begins with Darl describing the barn which he describes as “[s]quare,

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