In the book, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair portrays a Lithuanian immigrant family traveling to America in hopes to pursue the American dream. The American Dream is the ideology that every person in America should have an equal opportunity to achieve success and prosperity through hard work, determination, and taking initiative. Jurgis and his family were very optimistic on their quest to seek the fortunes that America claims to be able to provide. However, Jurgis Rudkus goes through many obstacles that take a toll in his life only to find out that the American dream is nothing but an overrated fantasy that is virtually impossible. One of the first obstacles that Jurgis encounters is when his family is in search for a house in America. Ona and …show more content…
Teta Elzbieta seek help from a real estate agent for available houses. The real estate agent pitches good deals to the women and they seem to be very convinced to seal the deal on the house. In actuality, the real estate agent was organizing a scam on his clients. He was offering a deal to Ona and Teta Elzbieta that sounded like something worth taking, so they close the deal. Unfortunately, the family finds out that the real estate agent was pulling a scam on them by selling the house as a “rental”. This meaning that they could be evicted from their home if they fail to pay the expected amount for rent each month. As soon as Jurgis sees this, he looks for a lawyer to help him clarify the mess. However, Jurgis soon realizes that the lawyer was apart of the scam as well. Jurgis blames himself in a sort of way when he says “they would swindle you with the contract—and how was a poor man to understand anything about a contract? It was all nothing but robbery, and there was no safety but keeping out of it and pay rent?” (41). Jurgis responds to this by being furious that his family and him are being cheated out of their money and taken advantage of their lack of knowledge of their new surroundings. The second obstacle that Jurgis faces during his time pursing the American Dream is finding out that his wife, Ona was harassed, raped, and forced into becoming a mistress to her boss.
Ona’s boss Phillip Conor is a character that reappears in the story numerous times as a man with enough power to control Jurgis’s family. Prior to Jurgis finding out, Ona and Jurgis’s relationship was drifting apart. He starts to feel a sense of emptiness in his life, and begins to drink. His relationship with Ona is very important to him because the main reason he came to America was to be able to support and keep Ona and his family happy . He feels as though he has failed to do so when Ona starts to isolate herself and their relationship start to wither. Jurgis responds to Ona’s harassment and rape from Phillip Conor in a very reckless way. He is enraged with anger, and decides to find Conor. Jurgis then attacks him viciously, which lands him in prison. This is a turning point in the story because his first attack with Phillip Conor was the first time where he has hit rock bottom. Jurgis never did something blown out of proportion until this he found out about Ona’s sexual harassment. This is due to his constant reminder that his purpose in America is to provide for his family. However, he fails this when he reminds himself in prison “Why punish him be leaving three week women and six helpless children starve and freeze?” (147). Getting thrown in prison meant that he abandoned his family …show more content…
and his ability to momentarily provide for them because of his violent decision. Phillip Conor was very known around the area, which enabled him to not allow Jurgis to find employment in the city. Jurgis’s attack on Conor also put him on the radar for getting thrown in prison a couple more times. This was a result of his past documentation of violence in court records. Jurgis’s response to this obstacle costed him numerous times in prison and sparked his binge drinking phase. The third obstacle that he faces in efforts to reach the American dream is finding out his son Antanas dies.
Jurgis finds out that his son dies from a freak accident, in which Antanas drowned in the mire of mud in the streets. Jurgis loved his son with an overwhelming devotion. He saw his son as a sense of hope for him to continue doing back breaking work in order to provide for Antanas. However, when his son dies, Jurgis starts to lose a sense in motivation to work or purse the American dream anymore. This is easy to assume because Sinclair states “ When his wife died, he went to the nearest saloon, but he did not do that now, though he had a week’s worth of wage in his pocket” (193). At this point in Jurgis’s life, he was so use to the misery that when Antanas died, he no longer felt pain. He sounds as though he is hopeless and sees that he no longer has a purpose to succeed in America
anymore. In my opinion, I believe that the most significant obstacle that Jurgis goes through is the loss of his son. This is because it is an obstacle that he never really overcame. His son and Ona was his motivation to continue striving for the American dream, however, with the death of the two most important people to him he suddenly loses the drive to beg for money. Throughout the book, we can see that Jurgis goes through many hardships. Despite his misery, he does not give up on providing or surviving for his family. His son was all that he had left, and once he lost his son, he stops worrying about providing for his family. I also believe that his son represented a sense of hope for the American dream because Antanas was born in the early stages of their immigration to America. Jurgis saw a sense of purpose in all the work he was putting forth because of Antanas. The Progressive reformers would have provided more government control into the cities. The government could have been more serious and buckled down on standards and policies of sanitation that cities were suppose to meet. This would have led to better working conditions and an overall more sanitary city. Sanitation is an important aspect in cities because it prevents diseases from spreading and increase mortality rates. This would have been a better outcome for Antanas and the rest of Jurgis’s family. The streets of the cities would have not been so muddy with the government’s involvement and it would have stopped Antanas freak accident from happening. Therefore, Jurgis still would have been able to hope in providing for his family.
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.
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.
Jurgis once hope to embrace as he lived the “American dream” is nothing more than
Sinclair's novel is meant to entirely reject the capitalist system and to bring in its place a socialist system. In this novel, capitalism and its exploitation of the immigrants and other workers, are in fact shown to be tools of the capitalist bosses, used as another means to control and mislead them. In Sinclair's novel the broken dreams of Jurgis Rudkis and his fellow Lithuanian immigrants, unions are meant to be institutions which give false hope to the workers. They live in utterly dreadful circumstances and are exploited like animals by their capitalist bosses. The women are forced to work at an inhuman pace, lose money if they cannot, and then fired if the complain. (106). And the men in the packinghouses like slaves in hell. When Jurgis is lucky enough to be picked for work, he finds working conditions to hardly fitting of the American Dream for which he left his native Lithuania. Sinclair is relentless in providing page after page of detailed horrors the immigrants faced everyday at work, "there were the beef luggers who carried two-hundred-pound quarters into the refrigerators cars, a fearful kind of work, that began at four o'clock in the morning, and that wore out the most powerful men in a few years.......of..... al those who used knives, you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb (101).
Besides strength, Jurgis was a curious man who yearned to learn the American culture, the language, and get ahead to live the life other than a poor Lithuanian immigrant. He loved his family, especially his wife, Ona, and worked hard to ensure all their basic needs were provided. He learned quickly, while working for the Beef Trust, that he had to work independently and not rely upon others to get the job done. An accident left Jurgis with a broken ankle and shortly afterward unemployed. The beginning of Jurgis’ violent episodes of anger and violence was introduced when “…little Stanislovas spent most of the day dancing about in horrible agony, till Jurgis flew into a passion of nervous rage and swore like a madman, declaring he would kill him if he did not stop.”(131) Another example of his violence was when Ona admitted to him that her supervisor, Phil Conner, had threatened her and her family’s employment if she would not be his mistress. Jurgis flew into such a rage that he at...
The life of Jurgis Rudkus, from the novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, shares many parallels to the life of the working class in American society during the period 1865 to 1910 that limits the freedom of the working class. Even though it is stated on paper that working class citizens such as Jurgis are equals and just as free as the upper class citizens, people like Jurgis are not truly “free” because the social and political forces at the time are limiting their ability to exercise their freedom, trapping them in an endless circle of poverty and despair.
When arriving to America the family sees the real way that the people live in the city and immediately know it is not the life they thought it would be. When arriving to the city Jurgis says, “Tomorrow, I will get a job, and perhaps Jonas will get one also; and then we can get a place of our own”(Sinclair 35). Jurgis arrives to america with an eagerness to find work to support his family which becomes more and more difficult for him as the story goes on. The constant bad luck that happens to Jurgis is later connected to the faults of capitalism and how corrupt it is for the working class in this society. Soon Jurgis could not support his family on his own and eventually the entire family needs to get a job to pay for their costs. Sinclair builds sympathy for Jurgis and his family throughout the beginning of the novel but also depicts the poverty of the working class and how they are equally struggling to make a living.
In the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, many immigrants came to the United States to pursue the American Dream. The American Dream is a belief that anyone can have success and prosperity through hard work in a society where upward social mobility is possible. The values and ideals of the American dream consist of democracy, equality, fairness, justice, and liberty. In Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, he portrays through a Lithuanian immigrant family the hardships immigrants faced while seeking a better life in America. One member of the Lithuanian immigrant family is Jurgis Rudkus, who marries a young woman named Ona Lukoszait. After they get married, Jurgis and Ona move into a home in Chicago with some of Ona’s family members. As the family struggles to pay for the house, they undertake stressful jobs and become workers of cruel and selfish employers. Although employers exploit Jurgis, Jurgis continues to tell Ona that he “will work harder” (Sinclair, 22) to help them achieve the American Dream. Upton Sinclair portrays how capitalism attacks the values of the American Dream through the ugly effects of capitalism, such as exploitation, poor working conditions, dishonesty, manipulation, and corruption.
During the Gilded age, the United States used its growing industrial development and began to appear as a profitable powerhouse. During this time America had a sufficient economic capital to endure such hasty industrialization; however it was a different story when it came to labor. The solution to this problem was European immigration. Since many European immigrants came to America looking for work opportunities, they unintentionally provided an alternative of cheap labor for American factories and businesses. These Europeans were thrilled to come to the United States. They saw America as a land of opportunity, and a chance to live the "American Dream". Upon arrival to this dreamland of opportunity, the United State's capitalistic society ruined many ambitions of said immigrants and embedded them into a harsh routine that controlled each aspect of their lives. In Upton Sinclair’s story The Jungle we are introduced to Jurgis Rudkus and his family, they are poor Lithuanian immigrants who came to America in search of an easier life, only to end up working in Packingtown also known as the meatpacking plants of Chicago. To some readers Jurgis and his family face massive hardships such as cruel and hazardous working conditions, poverty and famine, corrupt businessmen who take their money and crooked politicians who take advantage of them. To other readers, Jurgis and his family made rash and senseless decisions on their own. Upton Sinclair's The Jungle accentuates the manipulation of many immigrants as they attempt to achieve the unachievable "American Dream".
People from all around the world have dreamed of coming to America and building a successful life for themselves. The "American Dream" is the idea that, through hard work and perseverance, the sky is the limit in terms of financial success and a reliable future. While everyone has a different interpretation of the "American Dream," some people use it as an excuse to justify their own greed and selfish desires. Two respected works of modern American literature, The Great Gatsby and Death of a Salesman, give us insight into how the individual interpretation and pursuit of the "American Dream" can produce tragic results.
The American Dream has been the ideal way of life to every citizen. Equal opportunity to achieve success through hard work and persistence allows people to strive for The American Dream. For others, The Dream might have a different meaning to what the think is achievable. In the essay, “Is the American Dream even possible” John Steinbeck makes accusations about the American Dream and the credibility of it. The American Dream in Steinbeck's perspective is that in reality, The Dream is there to believe but not there to its full potential.
The concept of the American Dream has always been that everyone wants something in life, no matter if it is wealth, education, financial stability, safety, or a decent standard of living. In addition, everyone will try to strive to get what they want. The American Dream, is said to be that everyone should try and get what they hope they can get in life. In the play A Raisin in the Sun the author Hansberry tells us about a family where each has an American Dream, and Hughes in the poem “ Let America be America Again “is telling us to let America be the America that was free for us to obtain The American Dream. Hansberry and Langston see America like as a place to find the dream desired, although they also see limitation to obtain the American Dream, such as poverty, freedom, inequality, racism and discrimination.
Each character in the novel has their own interpretation of the ‘American Dream – the pursuit of happiness’ as they all lack happiness due to the careless nature of American society during the Jazz Age. The American Dreams seems almost non-existent to those whom haven’t already achieved it.
The portrayal of the ‘American Dream’—that one could start out at the bottom and work their way up to become rich—was appealing to immigrants because it convinced them they could accomplish this easier in America rather than in their home country. In the 19th century, leading into the early 20th century, America had a flood of immigrants due to the high demand for labour workers. Stockyards were some of the earliest rising companies of the U.S.A., which provided many job opportunities. In 1904 there was a failed strike against a stockyard in Chicago which attracted an American writer named Upton Sinclair, which is stated in the introduction of The Jungle (14). He developed a motif to write the muckraking novel, The Jungle published in 1906.
In conclusion, the American dream targeted the individual working hard in the pursuit to become successful and wealthy, with high-quality job and prosperity. In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the American dream symbolizes being free from any kind of restrictions and the ability to have the pleasure in the wide-open Western edge. However, The Great Gatsby criticizes the American dream due to moral and social value decay of the society.