The Jungle

The Jungle

"The Jungle" portrays the lower ranks of the industrial world as the scene of a naked struggle for survival. Where workers not only are forced to compete with each other but, if they falter, are hard pressed to keep starvation from their door and a roof over their heads. With unions weak and cheap labor plentiful, a social Darwinist state of "the survival of the fittest" exists. The real story revolves around the integration and eventual disintegration of Jurgis Rudkis and his family, Lithuanian immigrants who move to the Chicago stockyards in hopes of a better life. Unfortunately, their hopes quickly disintegrate; like thousands of other unskilled immigrants at the turn of the century, financial necessity forces them into virtual slave labor in order to survive. For Jurgis and his family, the slave master is the ruthless and greedy meat packing industry, whose leaders value their workers no more than the animals they slaughter.

"The Jungle" shows the relationship between the animals that were being slaughtered and the workers who were slaughtering them, from very early in the novel. It compares the workers to the animals who are penned up and killed every day in the stockyards, which are moved along on conveyer belts by machinery that cares nothing for their individual desires. In the monotonous killing of each of the hogs, "They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done here, swinging them up in this cold blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense of apology without the homage of a tear."(Pg. 35) The key comparison is the condition of the workingmen; as cold, efficient machinery assimilates them, a blind fate swallows them up. A few of the men are even swallowed up literally when they would fall into huge vats and emerges as "Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard". (Pg. 99) "The Jungle" also shows precisely how wounded, diseased, and pregnant animals are turned into food under just the same unhealthy conditions that soon leave healthy men wounded and diseased; "There was no heat upon the killing beds; the men might as well have worked out of doors all winter…. On the killing beds you were apt to be covered with blood, and it would freeze solid; if you leaned against a pillar, you would freeze to that, and if you put your hand upon the blade of your knife, you would run a chance of leaving your skin on i...

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...e for him. There had to be something to show him the meaning of his sacrifices. It is then that he happens upon a Socialist political meeting. At this point, Jurgis truly is a beaten man. However, when he listens to the political speaker, he finds that he expresses the essence of all his pain and frustration. He takes Socialism to his heart, believing that it is the only political philosophy that can save his kind.

"They were so innocent, they came so very trustingly; and they were so very human in their protests-and so perfectly within their rights!"(Pg. 35) This is exactly how each of the immigrant families came over to America just like the hogs, cattle, sheep and many other animals that came into to the stockyards of Chicago only to find that a shadow of a deadly fate was awaiting their arrival. Each family arrived with hopes and dreams of succeeding in this free country were they could work for honest wages and live peacefully, but with each dream and hope came death and despair. It was a huge rat race, in which it was every man for himself, but not even the strongest could survive in this urban jungle for only the wealthy and corrupt were the ones who made it to the top.