The Jungle: The Explicit Naturalism and Deep Rhethoric Techniques

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Recommended: An analysis of the jungle

“The Jungle” is a sociological novel, the work of public and literature heritage. The story is about the hard destiny of Lithuanian immigrants who seek for freedom and justice in America that become the hostages of merciless socialistic labor system in the United States. Jurgis Rudkus suffers from the loss of his family that took place in the naturalistic scenes of gloomy slaughterhouses of Chicago, where, in monstrous miasmatic of demoralization, the hero flay the dead tubercular carcasses. With the help of grandiose rhetorical techniques like metaphor, parallelism, simile, key words, amplification and outstanding verbal approaches, Upton Sinclair won the hearts of thousands people due to his heartfelt language of explicit naturalism and showed the oppressing atmosphere of socialism.

The power of the language is noticed in numerous psychologically philosophic and social scientific doctrines of human life as the mighty tool to hide and disclose the reality; run the crowd; force and motivate people to do certain things as well as stop them from doing some actions at all. Sinclair understood the principle of language power better than anyone else in the 1900s. His works could be compared with the business of muckraker – the journalists who unfold the scandal and controversial facts about secret deeds of government. The power of the novel is in the merciless naturalistic descriptions of details and wide usage of various rhetoric techniques.

The title itself contains the metaphoric purpose. “The Jungle” is a metaphor that symbolizes the socially twisted American city in the terms of socialism. It is like impenetrable forest of stone trees where people lose their values and ideologies. We can oversee the elements of metaphor in the...

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...ite the charter of your liberties?” (4) “Can you not see that the task is your task—yours to dream, yours to resolve, yours to execute?”(4) It is a great deal when Sinclair describes the atmosphere of moral decay, applying the critical pronouns – I, me, you, they – to show the almost global scales of the problem that concerns every common citizen of America.

Every single rhetorical technique such as metaphor, parallelism, simile, key words or amplification is aimed to enforce the atmosphere of merciless and uncompromised social naturalism and unfold the disgusting truth to people. We can see the oppressive environment and life in Chicago through Sinclair’s eyes and feel the depressing periods of socialism that, evidently, transformed from a dream to nightmare.

Works Cited

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Charleston, South Carolina: Forgotten Books, 1942. Print.

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