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The jungle upton sinclair novel
Examples of life of immigrants in the jungle
The jungle upton sinclair novel
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The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair is a 1906 novel written to show the harsh conditions and the unfair treatment of immigrants in Chicago and other industrialized cities. The book starts off at a traditional Lithuanian wedding, called a Veselija, in a hall near the stockyards of Chicago called Packingtown. Sinclair opens with the wedding of, Lukoszaite and Jurgis Ruckus, to show the reader how the immigrants are mistreated even at ritual event. Some guest at the wedding eat and drink without ever paying for it and the saloon keepers cheat the families on beer and liquor, by charging them more than what they actually had consumed. The Saloon Keepers often served the worst of the swill and automatically the reader is told to not trust or antagonize …show more content…
The book center on immigration heavily due to the fact that many people during the industrial revolution period came to America for better working opportunities, of course America needed them because they provided a cheap source of labor. The Jungle, focuses primarily on the poorer European migrating into the United States, in which changed the demographics of America cities by crowding them even more. Throughout The Jungle we see that Jurgis and his family lived in an overcrowded areas, with run down buildings and no access to clean water or proper sewage systems (“Sinclair”). Upton Sinclair shows us how the billionaire company owners mis use these migrant workers throughout the book. The book explains the gruesome inside of the factories and how at times people would get stuck in the machines and it would kill them; leaving the remains in the meat they were making,. Sinclair also explains that during the winter months (the worst months according to Jurgis) many workers would get frost bite due to lack of clothing, and how Jurgis got an infection on his foot that put him out of work for months due to the hazards conditions within the factory
The author Ken Kesey was born in La Junta, Colorado and went to Stanford University. He volunteered to be used for an experiment in the hospital because he would get paid. In the book “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, Kesey brings up the past memories to show how Bromden is trying to be more confident by using those thoughts to make him be himself. He uses Bromden’s hallucinations, Nurse Ratched’s authority, and symbolism to reveal how he’s weak, but he builds up more courage after each memory.
The 1906 novel, The Jungle talked about some of Sinclair’s concerns. Worker exploitation was one of his concerns. This novel also showed how companies would sell rancid vermin-infested meat and how it was processed. Most of the workers lived in Packingtown, which were immigrants and their children. Northern and Central Europe immigrants were mainly Protestants, even though numerous Irish and German Catholics moved as well. In the twentieth century, about nine million immigrants came to America. Many immigrants moved to Chicago rather than any city besides New York. The immigrants were attracted by the construction jobs in the downtown area and they would work in huge manufacturing firms.
In 1900, there were over 1.6 million people living in Chicago, the country's second largest city. Of those 1.6 million, nearly 30% were immigrants. Most immigrants came to the United States with little or no money at all, in hope of making a better life for themselves. A city like Chicago offered these people jobs that required no skill. However, the working and living conditions were hazardous and the pay was barely enough to survive on. This is the bases for Upton Sinclair's book, The Jungle.
Upton Sinclair's Purpose in Writing The Jungle Upton Sinclair wrote this book for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, he tries to awaken the reader to the terrible. living conditions of immigrants in the cities around the turn of the century. Chicago has the most potent examples of these. conditions.
One example to depict Los Angeles as a frontier town is how “Other sidewalk booths, like those ordinarily used as dispensaries of hot doughnuts and coffee, offered wild-cat mining shares, oil stock and real estate in some highly speculative suburb” (29). This shows the developmental activity in Los Angeles due to the real estate, the oil stock, and the wild-cat mining shares. Many people come to Los Angeles hoping to become rich and strike gold. Los Angeles is a frontier town that has a plethora of oil. In Adamic’s “Laughing in the Jungle,” he characterizes some of LA’s citizens as seeing “a tremendous opportunity to enrich themselves beyond anything they could have hoped for ten or even five years ago, and they mean to make the most of it” (52). This characterization of LA’s citizens is another way of Adamic depicting LA as a frontier town due to the exploitative activity that he describes. Another example of how Adamic portrays LA as a frontier town is because “Los Angeles is America. A jungle. Los Angeles grew up, suddenly, planlessly, under the stimuli of the adventurous spirit of millions of people and the profit motive” (54). Adamic clearly depicts the exploitative activity associated with LA as a frontier town. Another author who illustrates the exploitative activity to establish LA as a frontier town is Upton Sinclair. In
Throughout Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the author demonstrates the greed of Capitalism and how it gives politicians and businessmen the ability to exploit the immigrants population. Sinclair's main purpose in naming the book, The Jungle, is to put the reader's focus on the heartless politics of Capitalism. If he had named the book Stockyards or Packingtown, a person's concentration may be solely on these places. It is evident that Capitalism does not equally distribute the industries ruling, but rather allows certain groups to dominate the workers. The businessmen and politicians took advantages of this right and did not allow the immigrants to respond. They treated them very poorly, often working them so hard that they died or suffered from life long injuries. Since the story's main setting is in Packingtown, the reader is familiarized with this town and is engrossed with its surroundings. With the title The Jungle, the reader will want to closely examine why Sinclair chose this title instead. With another name, the reader might have been inclined to get distracted by the gruesome details and not have realized the Socialist concept that he was trying to convey. This title was necessary to enthrall the reader's mind to think about his purpose.
Sinclair’s The Jungle, is his fictionalized report of Chicago's Packingtown. It traces a family of Lithuanian immigrants in Chicago, and describes the horrifying living and working conditions they endure. Through Jurgis, the protagonist, and his family, Sinclair unfolds the tragedy of suffering of all Packinghouse workers in their pursuit of the American Dream. He gives a detailed description about their ordeals, from their lodging at boardinghouses to their buying of cheated house,...
“The Jungle” talks about a couple who move to an area of Chicago, “known as Packtown,” from Lithuania. Packtown is the center of Chicago’s meat packing industry. It
A major theme of The Jungle is socialism as a remedy for the evils of capitalism. Every event that takes place in the novel is designed to show a particular failure of capitalism. Sinclair attempts to show that capitalism is a "system of chattel slavery" and the working class is subject to "the whim of en every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers"(Sinclair 126). Sinclair portrays this view through Jurgis, a hardworking Lithuanian immigrant and his family. Sinclair uses the hardships faced by this family to demonstrate the effect of capitalism on working people as a whole. Jurgis' philosophy of "I will work harder" is shown not to work in this system. No matter how hard Jurgis worked, he and his family were still stuck in the same squalor. These characters did not overcome the odds and succeed. That would defeat the purpose of the novel; to depict capitalism as an economic and social system that ignores the plight of the working class and only cares for the wealthy, as well as furthering his socialist agenda.
An author depicts certain elements of a historical time period in his or her novel by incorporating literary elements. Upton Sinclair, the author of the novel ,The Jungle, was a Socialist who supported the rights of the working class in America’s economy. He lived during the time of the American Industrial Revolution when the lower class of the society were poverty-stricken while the upper class were wealthy and corrupt. He had observed the meat-packing factories of Chicago and incorporated the knowledge he had learned into his novel. In writing this novel, Sinclair’s goal was to expose the harsh conditions in American factories (“Upton Sinclair”). The novel takes place during the early 1900s in Chicago were a working immigrant man named Jurgis
In the early 1900’s there was a dramatic increase in the number of immigrants coming to the eastern shores of America. Many were pulled to America because of its economic opportunity, freedom, need for labor and its beautiful country. Immigrants were excited to come to America and were pushed from their home countries because of food shortages, overpopulation, war and political instability. This was going on in an important era in American history called the “gilded age”. It was a time of economic growth, and industrialization but also had high percentages of poverty mainly in urban environments. The majority of the immigrants intended to advance out west but actually settled in the eastern cities. In the book The Jungle, Jargis and his family moved to the Americas and hoped to live the “American Dream” but it was the exact opposite when they arrived. Jurgis, his wife Ona, and the rest of the Lithuanian family struggled with working conditions, living conditions, health problems, and maintaining a stable workplace. They were all dealt with disgusting conditions in the boarding houses and a brutal working environment in Packingtown. In 1905, when the book was written, there were very little government regulations, especially in the meat packing industry, which led to unsafe working conditions and sanitation issues.
The main characters of Sinclairs The Jungle, Jurgis and Ona, come over from Lithuania for a chance at a prosperous life in Chicago. The two are getting ready to get married and hold a celebration in the meatpacking district. A Lithuanian tradition, people who have not eaten are supposed to line the doorway and be fed by the wedding reception. One can imagine how many people would have been there.
The book, The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair, has portrayed how conditions and social norms of the early 1900’s helped shape society through social reform. Sexism, racism, and class, shaped the experiences and choices of the immigrants in The Jungle throughout the book. The huge difference between the classes was the most significant of the three. Sinclair used the story of one immigrant and his family to help show what was going on in society at that time, to raise awareness, and to promote socialism.
“The Jungle,” written by Upton Sinclair in 1906, describes how the life and challenges of immigrants in the United States affected their emotional and physical state, as well as relationships with others. The working class was contrasted to wealthy and powerful individuals who controlled numerous industries and activities in the community. The world was always divided into these two categories of people, those controlling the world and holding the majority of the power, and those being subjected to them. Sinclair succeeded to show this social gap by using the example of the meatpacking industry. He explained the terrible and unsafe working conditions workers in the US were subjected to and the increasing rate of corruption, which created the feeling of hopelessness among the working class.
His inspiration for The Jungle stemmed from an assignment that he was working on in order to expose the social injustices of workers in the meat industry. (“Upton Sinclair Biography.” The Biography.com.). During this time period, “…more than 15 million immigrants arrived in the United States” which “…was equal to the number of immigrants who had arrived in the previous 40 years combined” (“Immigrants in the Progressive Era.”). With this increase in population, jobs became scarce and the mistreatment of workers escalated. The newspaper, Appeal to Reason, wanted to cover this, so Sinclair was sent to Chicago to research the working conditions of the meat packing industry (“Upton Sinclair Biography.” The Biography.com.). Here, Sinclair “…spent seven weeks observing the observations of a meat-packing plant…” before he was compelled to write The Jungle with a strong emphasis on socialism (“Upton Sinclair Biography.” Encyclopedia of World Biography.). The novel became an instant success, and regulations concerning the meat packing industry were changed forever. After Sinclair met with President Theodore Roosevelt and further inspections of the meat industry were conducted, the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act were passed (“Upton Sinclair Biography.” The