Similarities Between the Settings of the Jungle and as I Lay Dying

Setting, Stress, and Struggles

As the great writer Napoleon Hill once said, “Nature cannot be tricked or cheated. She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price”. The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair, was published in 1906 and tells the story of a Lithuanian immigrant who struggles, along with his family, to make a living in Chicago in the early 1900s. As I Lay Dying, written by William Faulkner, is about a poor rural family’s struggle against the forces of nature to bury their dead mother. Although the settings of The Jungle and As I Lay Dying are completely different in terms of time and place, both of the novels contribute to the intensity of the conflicts of these stories and the issues between their respective characters.

The Jungle is set in industrial Chicago, during the peak of the American Industrial Revolution. The fictional setting of this book is based on the actual city of Chicago, and is filled with poverty, filth, and death. A majority of the events that transpire in The Jungle are set in the meatpacking factories, where Jurgis Rudkins and his family struggle to make ends meet while battling with crude and foul conditions. There is much description given to the disgusting aspects of city life, as Sinclair writes:

The roadway was commonly several feet lower than the level of the houses, which were sometimes joined by high board walks; there were no pavements--there were mountains and valleys and rivers, gullies and ditches, and great hollows full of stinking green water. In these pools the children played, and rolled about in the mud of the streets; here and there one noticed them digging in it, after trophies which they had stumbled on. One wondered about this, as also about the swarms of flies which hung about the scene, literally blackening the air, and the strange, fetid odor which assailed one's nostrils, a ghastly odor, of all the dead things of the universe. (Sinclair NP).

Oftentimes, the lack...