Of Dewey Dell Bundren In William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying

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“The Lord gave you what you have, even if He did use the devil to do it; you let Him take it away from you if it’s His will to do so” (203) said the drug-store owner, Moseley, to pregnant seventeen-year-old Dewey Dell Bundren in William Faulkner’s stream-of-consciousness novel As I Lay Dying. This Depression Era work of fiction analyzed many social issues of the Southern times from the curiosity of souls – “My mother is a fish” (84) – to faithlessness in marriage to disassociating with the mentally unstable. However, this one source of conflict for the only Bundren daughter is an interesting one to pursue. To some readers, they agree with the aforementioned quote and firmly support that Moseley has the right to deny her that service while others…show more content…
Religious dissenters were burned as witches and stoned as blasphemers even though America was founded by pilgrims, people who were forced to leave Great Britain to escape the persecution of the Church of England. Eventually, almost all branches of Christianity were accepted with the exception of the religious sect of Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam. It was not until the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 that America had its first Catholic president, and even then there was the fear that the Pope would be the one in control of the White House. In the memoir novel, Night, there is a recollection of the narrator/main character, Elie, that no one seemed much interested in the fate of his people because of their faith. For example, average citizens and not soldiers tortured the Jewish prisoners in their own ways like, “…a worker took a piece of bread out of his bag and threw it into a wagon. There was a stampede. Dozens of starving men fought desperately over a few crumbs. The worker watched the spectacle with great interest” (Wiesel 100). This was true as Americans held no love for Jews as Hitler did. The major difference, however, is that the Nazis decided to cull them out of society while they tried to conquer all of Europe so the Allies were roped into saving them while simultaneously fighting the Nazis. Today the hate has been transferred – as with the creation of the Jewish nation of Israel in 1948 – thus they are allied to the United States – to the oil-holding Muslims terrorizing the nation and to other Muslims from the women wearing hijabs to other such cultural traditions. For example, one pregnant Muslim woman entered a Dominos establishment to order a veggie pizza while wearing a hijab, and the employees accused her of making bombs threats for which she was

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