The Jungle is Upton Sinclair

1401 Words3 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The jungle analysis essay

The Jungle is Upton Sinclair’s novel that narrates the tragedy of Jurgis Rudkus and his family, Lithuanian immigrants who travel to America to work in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. It is a grim story of suffering and hardship. This family undergoes considerable difficulties that vary from the appalling and unsafe working conditions, to poverty and starvation, in addition to merciless businessmen who extort their money as well as dishonest politicians who generate laws that permit the existence of such scandal. Furthermore, the narrative traces Jurgis’ transformation when he meets the new political and economic system of socialism. The novel also uncovers, in one of its parts, the sickening and disgusting methods of the meat processing (Karolides 281). The story begins with Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite, a young couple who have immigrated to Chicago from Lithuania, who celebrate their wedding feast at a saloon in a region of Chicago known as Packingtown. With the aim to assure a better life, the couple and a number of their relatives have come to Chicago; but Packingtown; the main destination of Lithuanian immigration and the center of Chicago’s meatpacking industry; is a severe, hazardous, and filthy place where it is hard to find a job. After the party, Jurgis and Ona find themselves indebted to the saloonkeeper with more than a hundred dollars. Customs in Lithuania suggest that at wedding-feast guests should leave money in solidarity to aid cover the cost. However, things are different in America as the majority of the poor immigrants leave the feast without contributing with the least dime. Jurgis, who strongly believes in the American Dream, pledges that he will work harder to provide more money (SparkNotes Editors). Beca... ... middle of paper ... ... prostitute to help support Teta Elzbieta and the children (Karolides 283). Jurgis descends into the deepest despair of his soul. One time, he meanders around the streets with a hope to find a warm place where to sit for a while. He comes across a socialist political rally. There, he finds an orator delivering a speech that attracts him and fills him with hope and motivation. Jurgis becomes a member of the socialist party and adopts its principle to the effect that workers should own factories and plants. Jurgis gets an employment as a porter at a hotel owned by a socialist and is reunited with Teta Elzbieta (Karolides 284). At one of the socialist rallies, in which Jurgis is present, the orator recapitulates the new principles arguing that in condition that more people will adopt socialism, the speaker announces, then “Chicago will be ours!” (Sinclair 373)

Show More
Related

  • Examples Of Socialism In The Jungle

    1127 Words  | 3 Pages

    Instead, he found that the same poverty that existed in Lithuania existed in America. His family put all of their money together to purchase a very modest home, only to find that if they missed one payment, they would lose the home. This follows very closely to what actual immigrants to America experienced. The early 20th century was a rapidly growing time and people flocked from all over the world to come to America where most ended up in major cities such as Chicago. It was in these cities that multiple families were forced to live in broken down tenement buildings because they could not earn a living wage

    Read More

  • Upton Sinclair's The Jungle: The Progressive Era

    735 Words  | 2 Pages

    Upon his 1906 publishing of The Jungle, Sinclair was coined as an avid “muckraker” when President Roosevelt addressed an audience in April of that year. When asked whether or not the novel provided a realistic account of workers conditions within the Chicago meat packing industry, Roosevelt accused Sinclair of being a liar in an attempt to discredit him. A large part of this was credited to Roosevelt’s personal distaste for Sinclair’s apparent link to the Socialist party but, Roosevelt was also unaware that Sinclair had worked undercover at the plant to gather first hand and accurate accounts. The Jungle shined light on the poor working conditions of workers in a meat packing facility. Throughout the novel, Sinclair gave gruesome examples of what workers went through each and every day. Each department of the facility was faced with its own risks and challenges, “There were the wool pluckers, whose hands went to pieces even sooner than the hands of the pickle men; for the pelts of the sheep had to be painted with acid to loosen the wool, and then the pluckers had to pull out this wool with

    Read More

  • The Land Of Opportunity And Dreams In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

    1875 Words  | 4 Pages

    The United States of America is known as the land of opportunity and dreams. People dream of migrating to this nation for a chance of a better a life. This belief has been around for many years, ever since the birth of the United States; therefore it’s a factor in which motivate many people migrate to the United States. Upton Sinclair, author of the Jungle, narrates the life of a Lithuanian family and there struggles with work, crime, family loss, and survival in the city of Packingtown. Sinclair expresses her disgust as well as the unbelievable truth of life in the United States involving politics, corruption, and daily struggle that many suffered through in the 19th and 20th century.

    Read More

  • Muckrakers

    393 Words  | 1 Pages

    The Jungle, the 1906 exposé of the Chicago meatpacking industry. The novel focuses on an immigrant family and sympathetically and realistically describes their struggles with loan sharks and others who take advantage of their innocence. More importantly, Sinclair graphically describes the brutal working conditions of those who find work in the stockyards. Sinclair's description of the main character's

    Read More

  • Socialism and Capitalism in The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

    658 Words  | 2 Pages

    Jurgis comes to America as a strong willed man looking for better opportunities for his family and himself but is slowly crushed by the hard struggles of a working class man in a society where capitalism is dominant. Sinclair portrays socialism as the resolution to the story but especially to Jurgis’ struggling life. By showing the torment that the working class had to go through because of capitalism, Sinclair wanted to promote the wondrous changes that socialism was going to bring. Sinclair highlights the terrible situations caused by capitalism but pushes for socialism through Jurgis’ intent in finding work, the struggling working class, and the inequality of the men in a capitalistic society.

    Read More

  • Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and the Pure Food and Drug Act

    1672 Words  | 4 Pages

    conditions of a Lithuanian family that moved to the US, and had to work, live, and die for the food companies in Chicago. “The Jungle” spurred a movement in the American

    Read More

  • The Meat Inspection Act of 1906

    586 Words  | 2 Pages

    In 1906, socialist Upton Sinclair published The Jungle, a book he hoped would awaken the American people to the deplorable conditions of workers in the meat packing industry. Instead, the book sent the country reeling with its description of filthy, rat infested plants, suspect meats processed and sold to consumers, and corrupt government inspectors. President Roosevelt became seriously concerned by the charges brought forth by Mr. Sinclair and determined the only way to protect consumers from unscrupulous business and unsafe food was to enforce regulation.

    Read More

  • Upton Sinclair's The Jungle - Socialism

    436 Words  | 1 Pages

    The enormous rush of European immigrants encountered a lack of jobs. Those who were lucky enough to find employment wound up in factories, steel mills, or in the meat packing industry.  Jurgis Rudkus was one of these disappointed immigrants. A sweeper in slaughter house, he experienced the horrendous conditions which laborers encountered. Along with these nightmarish working conditions, they worked for nominal wages, inflexible and long hours, in an atmosphere where worker safety had no persuasion.  Early on, there was no one for these immigrants to turn to, so many suffered immensely.  Jurgis would later learn of worker unions and other groups to support the labor force, but the early years of his Americanized life were filled, with sliced fingers, unemployment and overall a depressing and painful  "new start."

    Read More

  • The Struggles of Families in Poverty in The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

    1135 Words  | 3 Pages

    ...ous struggles of Jurgis and his family. Not only does the family suffer from poverty, but they also suffer from a poor knowledge of English, the glares of the townspeople, and the damaging effects of hard manual labor. The family gets harmed by the bosses in Packingtown as well, they receive unfair wages for long days at work. They also get deceived by the housing agent, forcing them to pay much more money for the house as a result of insurance, an expense they were not prepared for. As a result of the hard manual labor and his name being put on the blacklist, Jurgis resorts to “hoboing it” just to survive towards the end of the novel. The poverty tears the family apart: they end up splitting up towards the end of the novel, all going separate ways. Poverty negatively impacted the familial relationships of thousands of immigrants in Chicago in the early 1900s.

    Read More

  • The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

    720 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the "Gilded Age" immigrants from all over the world became part of America's working nation in hopes of finding a new and better life for themselves and their families. As more and more new families moved to America with high hopes, more and more people fell victims to the organized society, politics, and institutions better described as, the system. The system was like a jungle, implying that only the strong survived and the weak perished. Bosses always picked the biggest and strongest from a throng of people desperate for work, and if you were big and strong, you were more likely to get the job then if you were small and weak. Packing town was also a Jungle in the sense that the people with more authority or political power acted as predators and preyed on the working people, taking their money unfairly because of the their lack of knowledge on the pitfalls of the New World and their inability to speak and understand the universal language adequately. The unjust and corrupt system kept workers from speaking out when they felt they had been wronged and punished them when they did. As a result of the system, men women and even children were overworked, underpaid and taken advantage of. Working immigrants weren't any better off in American then they were in their homeland, as they soon discovered. Dreams that any people had of America were washed away by the corrupt ways of the system.

    Read More

  • Upton Sinclair And The Progressive Era

    1725 Words  | 4 Pages

    Taking place in the jungle of meat packing factories during the early 1900s in Chicago, a journalist by the name of Upton Sinclair dissects the savage inner workings of America’s working class factory lifestyle. Sinclair portrayed the grim circumstance that workers faced and the exploited lives of factory workers in Chicago. He became what was then called a mudrucker; a journalist who goes undercover to see first hand the conditions they were investigating. Being in poor fortune, Sinclair was able to blend into the surrounds of the factory life with his poor grimy clothing. The undercover journalist would walk into the factory with the rest of the men, examine its conditions, and record them when he returned home. It is the worker’s conditions

    Read More

  • Upton Sinclair's The Jungle as Socialist Propaganda

    3115 Words  | 7 Pages

    In the world of economic competition that we live in today, many thrive and many are left to dig through trashcans. It has been a constant struggle throughout the modern history of society. One widely prescribed example of this struggle is Upton Sinclair's groundbreaking novel, The Jungle. The Jungle takes the reader along on a journey with a group of recent Lithuanian immigrants to America. As well as a physical journey, this is a journey into a new world for them. They have come to America, where in the early twentieth century it was said that any man willing to work an honest day would make a living and could support his family. It is an ideal that all Americans are familiar with- one of the foundations that got American society where it is today. However, while telling this story, Upton Sinclair engages the reader in a symbolic and metaphorical war against capitalism. Sinclair's contempt for capitalist society is present throughout the novel, from cover to cover, personified in the eagerness of Jurgis to work, the constant struggle for survival of the workers of Packingtown, the corruption of "the man" at all levels of society, and in many other ways.

    Read More

  • An Analysis Of The Jungle By Upton Sinclair

    1412 Words  | 3 Pages

    In the early 1900's life for America's new Chicago immigrant workers in the meat packing industry was explored by Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle. Originally published in 1904 as a serial piece in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason, Sinclair's novel was initially found too graphic and shocking by publishing firms and therefore was not published in its complete form until 1906. In this paper, I will focus on the challenges faced by a newly immigrated worker and on what I feel Sinclair's purpose was for this novel.

    Read More

  • meat packing industry

    992 Words  | 2 Pages

    At the turn of the twentieth century “Muckraking” had become a very popular practice. This was where “muckrakers” would bring major problems to the publics attention. One of the most powerful pieces done by a muckraker was the book “The Jungle”, by Upton Sinclair. The book was written to show the horrible working and living conditions in the packing towns of Chicago, but what caused a major controversy was the filth that was going into Americas meat. As Sinclair later said in an interview about the book “I aimed at the publics heart and by accident hit them in the stomach.”# The meat packing industry took no responsibility for producing safe and sanitary meat.

    Read More

  • Saloon Culture

    1462 Words  | 3 Pages

    The article discusses the need for these early Chicago saloons as a neighborhood commune for those men who labor long hours only to come home to poverty and despair of a desolate household. Melendy focuses on the mental, physiological, and moral nature of these workingmen. He points out that this saloon culture allows it’s patrons to develop these traits by interacting with their peers—others facing the same despair. These establishments are described as the “workingman’s school. He is both scholar and teacher” (Melendy pg. 78). Patrons gather at the bar, around tables and in the next room amongst games of pool, cards, and darts to discuss political and social problems, sporting news, and other neighborhood gossip. Here men, native and immigrant, exchange opinions and views of patriotism, brotherhood, and lessons in civil government. Melendy describes this atmosphere as cosmopolitan, and articulates that these businesses advertise this issue in their names. For example one of the downtown saloons was entitled “Everybody’s Exchange.” The saloon’s customers experienced a buffet of nationalities upon which was not so for those of poverty in previous decades. Saloons also served as disguises of corruption as Melendy illustrates by declaring “...

    Read More

More about The Jungle is Upton Sinclair

Open Document