In Upton Sinclair's book “The Jungle” he states many points that have big impact in our lives today, some points he declares are how dishonest the society was. The second thing that was mentioned in the book very well is the titles and metaphors. The third thing is “order” which is another way of saying social class of the people. The fourth thing is “cross section” where the plot can be laid out side by side and evaluated as it is. The last point that is said from Sinclair is “i aimed for the public's heart...and i hit the stomach which is a big part in history. One of the first many problems Jurgis faces is how dishonest people were. Also as for his family they got treated like garbage. For example, ona gets taken advantage of at work …show more content…
by her boss and jurgis retaliates by going to the factory and beating up the boss. Then ona starts to lie to Jurgis on where she was then gets lost in one of the worst blizzards in chicago, and gets deathly ill. After some questioning on if ona was going to make it or not she passed away while jurgis was holding hr hand. Shortly after ona dies jurgis goes to the bar and is the state of mind of getting drunk to drink his payn and sorrow away. Long after ona passes jurgis gets pass all the sob,and starts giving is youngest son Antanas more attention than he did. Then when jurgis came home one day he noticed a crowd of people around the raggedy old house and jurgis starts asking around and he figures out what is wrong, and Antanas had died from drowning in the street from a deep hole in the street. Finally there was no hope for jurgis he was so mad about how people could have so much money and he could be so poor and work so hard. The way jurgis looked at life was it was unfair to him because he worked his tail off and as for others did nothing and were getting weighed down with money in the mud.
Jurgis even saw a women walking in the street with change sewed on to her clothing and she was so heavy that she got forced into the mud from her weight. Also what jurgis noticed that was, when people looked at the sausage they wanted it looked really good but nobody knew the components of the ingredients. There were many people that lived in healthy households that got killed because of the meat. Another example is the lithuanian family expected to get get a decent house and then once they got to where they were going to stay they realized all the wrongs with the house which were the house was built on a sewer and was in one of the worst places in the town, which also signified how america was during this time. So after all immigrants got to america, they suffered from groups and classes with in america, if the immigrants wanted to fight against the economy they suffered so many consequences they had to go threw so they had to find a way to go against …show more content…
poverty. One of the many classes was called “order’” which was basically social class. What was meant by this was like when jurgis fluctuates threw out the book. For example juris and his family got to america and was expecting america to be great, but they soon realized that life was going to be harder than they expected. Then jurgis and his family started to get paid better and life started to look like it was going uphill.jurgis even gets a hundred dollar bill and was really excited about it. Then when jurgis went to go cash the check, he didn't know where to go because he knew anybody he tried would try to take his money. So finally, after he gets the courage to try to cash the money the bartender tried to take his money. So jurgis retaliated against the bartender he started a fight and got thrown back in gail. Then, while he was in jail he met back up with jack duane which was a criminal that made a living off of robbing banks. Then life took a plummet for the last time, this led into something called cross section. “ Cross section” is metaphorically laying life out side by side and viewing life from one perspective.
One way this is shown in the book is when jurgis's boss was mean to his family and ona was taken advantage of. Also the immigrants never really stood a chance. Especially when as soon as the family got to america they immediately got judged and were told to go the wrong way as soon as they got to america. Just because the simple fact that they were immigrants and were hated for their entire life by everybody. They also noticed that there were so many different types of people, and they all had there own way of retaliating against them. If they saw one person that was really nice and tried to help them the odds were that they more than likely ran into another person that was a lot more rude to them. Although, the family did want to cherish the small things in life and they did see some significance in life. Exactly how the author saw the significance in the
book. In the long run. After the family realized there chances for success were very low. The family learned a lot about who they were and who they were meant to be. That didn't only apply to every single lithuanian family. It was applied to every single immigrant that came to america. All families were introduced to the idea of “survival for the fittest” modo that all citizens faced. After everything was said and over with, Upton Sinclair wanted to push for socialism and anything anybody got from the book was how bad the meat was and that in itself was almost enough to change the economy to a communist government
In the books, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Plunkitt of Tammay Hall, they both focus on how life was like in America during 1905. But they show it in different perspectives. In the book The Jungle, the characters in it are attempting to live the American Dream after migrating from Lithuania to The United States. And in the Plunkitt of Tammay Hall, it is about a sentor named Geroge Washington Plunkitt, who shares his secrets on how to be the best Politican. Throughout both books, they both focus on many of the same issues, yet view them different. The three reoccuring themes I saw in bth books were, government corruption, social class conflicts, and Urbanization. Through out this paper, I will be analyzing the differences between the two books and these three themes.
The novel follows a family of immigrants from Lithuania working in a meatpacking factory, and as the novel progresses, the reader learns of the revolting conditions within the factories. Sinclair’s The Jungle illustrates the concept of Bitzer’s “Rhetorical Situation” and Emerson’s quote quite effectively. For instance, the horrendous safety and health conditions of the packing factories were the exigencies that Upton Sinclair was making clear to the reader. The rhetorical audience that Sinclair aimed to influence with his novel was Congress and the president, as both had to agree in order to establish health and safety bills to better the conditions within factories. Sinclair’s efforts did not go unnoticed as in 1906 both the Meat Inspection Act, and the Pure Food and Drug act were approved by both Congress and President Theodore Roosevelt (Cherny,
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
...abor reform through his book The Jungle, Upton Sinclair was able to show the world "how the system of graft and patronage functions, how the bosses, the politicians, the contractors, the criminals, the magistrates, and the police work hand in glove." He was also able to open the eyes of consumers and contribute to the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act, which proves this to be such an important piece of American literature.
In Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, “The Jungle,” he exposes corruption in business and government and its disastrous effects on a family from Lithuania. The novel follows immigrant Jurgis Rudkus as he struggles against the slow ANNIHILATION of his family and is REBORN after discovering that socialism as a cure away to all capitalism’s problems. The Jungle is an example of protest literature because it exposes in a muckraking style the DANGEROUS, INHUMAINE conditions that workers lived and worked in, corruption in business and politics and the unsanitary meat that was sold.
In The Jungle, Sinclair deeply understands his subjects and can make the plots real for the reader. Even in a small section of the book, Sinclair makes me feel, imagine and contemplate his words. Chapters 18 through 23, were chapters that Sinclair took time and effort to write and make it to perfection. In my own perspective, I think he achieved this accomplishment and made these chapters a realistic event.
From respectable authorities on the subject, and the 1906 Food and Drugs Act itself, gave paticual understanding of the events effecting that time period, a understanding of certain points in the novel “The Jungle”, and how the government went about solving the nation’s going problem, has lead myself to agree that Upton Sinclairs’s
...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.
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.
Sinclair, has shown in a dramatic style the hardships and obstacles which Jurgis and fellow workers had to endure. He made the workers sound so helpless and the conditions so gruesome, that the reader almost wants a way out for Jurgis. Sinclair's The Jungle is a "subliminal" form of propaganda for
The “new” immigrants came over hungry for work and were willing to work for a fraction of what the “old” immigrants would. The “new” immigrants came in unskilled and unaccustomed to American society, took the “old” immigrants jobs and shook up their neighborhoods; this created much tension between the two groups. Riis like others, hated some ethnic groups more than others, and in How the Other Half Lives establishes a general hierarchy placing the “old” immigrants on the top, groups such as Germans, Irish and the English. In the middle Riis ranks the Italians, Jews, and blacks. On the bottom of the ladder Riis places the Chinese.
The most significant event in the emergence of the twentieth century is the diversity and struggle of society's classes. The novel, The Jungle penned by Upton Sinclair attempts to display the social and economic challenges of the lower class by demonstrating the difficulties of a Lithuanian immigrant family.The predicament situation of Jurgis and his family reveals the dark side of the capitalism, therefore, it also revealed dominance and the exploitation of the bourgeoisie from the proletariat class.Throughout the novel, Jurgis and his family encounter varied difficulties from being unable to find a proper job to several deaths followed one after another due to the harsh life conditions consequently followed by the separation of the family
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, emphasizes the importance in changing to become a thriving society through socialism. Sinclair writes his novel to show the corruption that occurs as a result of capitalism. Jurgis’ family is in search for a better life in America where he believes he will make enough pay to support his family. The novel shows that poverty is in control over the working class, but the working class still has a desperation for money. In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair pushes for Socialism by showing Jurgis’ struggle to find work, the hardships of the packingtown workers, and the inequality of all men in this capitalistic society.
Foreigners, who were uneducated about America’s customs, were unable to find jobs or prevent swindlers from causing their already insufficient wealth to subside. Because of this, Jurgis and his family’s economic and social lives have changed drastically. For instance, in Lithuania, Jurgis and his family had many friends and, therefore, were well-respected in their community.... ... middle of paper ...
Sinclair stated that “the animals’ faith emphasized [his] views of how industry treats humankind” (Sinclair 8). Machinery was more important and valuable than the human life, especially the life of an immigrant worker with no rights and freedoms. The author concluded that society was the jungle where people had to work hard in order to survive and escape the challenges of their living. Continuous struggle was needed to maintain the challenges and problems of people’s everyday life enabling them to maintain control over their life and to get the current opportunities. Exploitation of immigrants was another important problem covered in the book promoting specific changes in society. In conclusion, Sinclair made a very convincing argument and his writing was so influential it prompted government action.