An Excerpt From 'Ona': A Narrative Fiction

One of every three inhabitants of flats of 4 or less rooms, irrespective of class, were overcrowded. In 1866, the Sanitary Act defined overcrowding as less than 400 cubic feet for each adult living in a room day and night, or 300 cubic feet for a sleeping room. For children, these dimensions were halved. This means that a man, woman, and one child living in a room 8'x10'x10' would be considered overcrowded. For statistical and census purposes, the London City Council ignored cubic capacity, and counted anything beyond two people per room as overcrowded. Hector Gavin, a lecturer in forensic medicine at Charing Cross Hospital estimated that if all the windows and doors of a typical laborers tenement were shut(against the cold, for example), the maximum length a man could survive before all available oxygen was consumed was seven hours. The Window Tax of 1695, which taxed any opening in a building's exterior walls, was finally repealed by the first Public Health Act of 1848.

There are three distinct classes of houses in the tenement-houses; the cheapest is the attic home. Three rooms is next and is usually for very poor people. The vast majority of respectable working people live in four rooms. Each of these classes reflects the needs and resources of the renters in that the attic home, for example, is generally one small room and is usually rented out by a lonely elderly person with not much money. Three rooms generally consist of a kitchen and two dark bedrooms and are usually rented out to very poor people who have a

One dark, misty night on Manor farm, the pigs were partying. They partied in the Jones house with Mr. Pilkington Napolean didn’t let any other animals into the house besides the pigs were so fat they couldn’t stand on two feet, they had to crawl. On the other hand the other animals were locked up in the barn and very mistreated; they were only fed leftover whiskey, milk, and apples.

Due to this loss, houses became very overcrowded to the point where families had to live in a single room. This would be where they would cook, eat, sleep and socialise. Rooms to rent became very popular.

It is winter and once again, Ona becomes pregnant. Although she should be happy, Jurgis senses that she is not. He begins to wonder if something is wrong. One night she does not come home and Jurgis dashes out to find her. The next morning he catches her on her way to work. She explains that the snow was too deep for her to walk home in so she stayed at a friend’s house.

It was too dark in these storage places to see well, but a man could run his hand over these piles of mean and sweep off handfuls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put poisoned bread out for them; they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go in the hoppers together.”# There was nothing the packers would not do to make a profit, if meat went bad they would pickle it or make sausage out of it, “there was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white-it would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption.”# The Packers took no responsibilities for the sickness that these meats caused. It was not uncommon for people to die from sickness they had gotten from eating bad meat, this is also an issue in “The Jungle” when a young family member suddenly dies one morning, “it was the smoked sausage he had eaten that morning-which may have been made out of some of the tubercular pork that was condemned unfit for export.”# Disease was also a factor for the workers, as quoted from the book “Meat and Men “Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle-rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world.”# It was also not uncommon for people to fall into the vats and become lard. “The public revolted at the

breakfast, fill a gourd with water, in another deposit they dinner of cold bacon and corn cake, and hurry to the field again. It is a offense invariably followed by a flogging, to be found at the quarters after daybreak. Then the fears and labors of another day begin ; and until its close there is no such thing as rest. He fears he will be caught lagging through the day.. he fears, when he lies down, that he will oversleep himself in the morning.

This shows that, although the worth of these objects was measly, they seemed to fill up the whole table, and in a way the narrator’s world. The narrator describes her mother’s appearance as having “tightly braided hair turning white” and convey that her mother has endured much hardship throughout her life. She also uses words such as “flung”, “crowds”, and “quick” to describe her mother’s actions, suggesting a sense of fervor and urgency when it came to handling

The animals in the farms, along with Jurgis, have limited to zero control over their own future because of the system that many wealthy, selfish businessman have stylized to give themselves the maximum profit. Jurgis and his fellow co-workers fell into a never ending cycle of expendability from the moment that stepped foot into America, just as the pigs play another role in society’s meat crave and statistics. Workers and pigs never meant much as a big picture, however, workers would kill the pigs and create meals out of them, just as the pigs create jobs to butcher the workers job’s into a job cycle that could never

“Wooden floors were an unknown luxury. In a single room were huddled, like cattle, ten or a dozen persons, men, women, and children. We had neither bedsteads nor furniture of any description. Our beds were collections of straw and old rags, thrown down in the corners and boxed in with boards; a single blanket the only covering.”

The next theme is lies and deception. Animal Farm is run on lies told by the pigs. The “truth” has been changed so much that the animals don't remember what actually happened. The pigs lie to the other animals to get better treatments and bigger rations. “All the other male pigs on the farm were porkers. The best known among them was a small fat pig named Squealer, with very round cheeks, twinkling eyes, nimble movements, and a shrill voice. He was a brilliant talker, and when he was arguing some difficult point he had a way of skipping from side to side and whisking his tail which was somehow very persuasive. The others said of Squealer that he could turn black into white” (Orwell, page?). Squealer, the pig, took unfortunate realities and turned them into lovely lies. For example, when the pigs got the privilege of sleeping in beds, he said that with the pigs resting their brains they could help the animals better.

Once each man is finished dancing with the bride he is supposed to donate money to the bride and groom in order for them to pay the bills of the veselija and maybe have a little left over for them to start their like upon. Many of the guests at Jurgis and Ona’s veselija were poor and could not afford to contribute money to the newlyweds; most of the young men at the feast would come in to fill themselves with food and alcohol, dance with Ona, and quickly disappear without paying. A veselija is said to cost around three hundred dollars, and Jurgis and his family make no where close to that amount. Because of this, Ona grew very terrified of all the bills they could not pay and how much debt they would be in. At the end of the night, Jurgis tells Ona that she won't be going to Brown’s, a meatpacking factory where Ona worked. Ona tries to argue that her not going will ruin them, however Jurgis just replies saying that she should just leave it to him and that he will work harder and earn more money.

The story opens at the veselija, or wedding gathering of Jurgis and his wife, Ona. They have recently come from Chicago and are celebrating their marriage in a bar in their neighborhood. It is a depiction of a substantial social affair of glad Lithuanian individuals getting a charge out of an uncommon wealth of sustenance, liquor, and great circumstances. There is music, moving, singing, and a large number of similar things we would expect today at a wedding party. At the point when hungry individuals stand outside the door, it is Lithuanian custom to welcome them inside for their fill of

The story opens up with Jurgis and Ona at their wedding feast in an area of Chicago known as Packingtown, Chicago’s meatpacking district. The place is filled with music, food, and drinks. Guests are invited from the streets to come join in on the celebration. Ona starts to get worried because after their veselija, or what we know it as a wedding feast, she noticed people were leaving without contributing money to the newlyweds as Lithuanian tradition follows. Some people snuck away and some people left without any shame knowing that they took advantage of the family, freeloading from the food and beer that was provided. Trying to free Ona of her worries of how they will pay back the saloonkeeper, Jurgis assured her, “I will earn more money-I will work harder.” Vowing that he will work harder and earn more money to pay back the debt of their wedding.

The fellow-traveller’s staff  “bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought, that it might almost be seen to twist and wriggle itself like a living serpent.” Bringing a large black snake into the physical setting is indeed one way to dramatically ratchet-up the tension and the foreboding of ill. In this passage the narrator identifies the traveller with the snake: "Sayest thou so?" replied he of the serpent, smiling apart.”