Summary of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Essay

Another form of exploitation that doesn’t allow Jurgis and his family to achieve their American dream is the long hours of labor they must work in order to maintain the family alive. These unhealthy long hours of labor that they must work brings the family physical and mental pain. When Jurgis starts to work in the meat packing plant he is exited and happy to have a job, soon after he discovers that he is engaged in unfair labor activities as well as unsafe food handling. In chapter 11 Jurgis suffers from a terrible accident at work. The company doctor tells him that he'll be laid up for months with a severe ankle and foot injury. The accident poses a terrible problem for the family. Without Jurgis' wages, they might starve. “It was dreadful that an accident of this sort, that no man can help, should have meant such suffering. The bitterness of it was the

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair was written to expose the brutality faced by the workers in the meatpacking industry. Sinclair wanted to show people what was really going on in the factory because few people were informed about these companies work conditions. He wanted to show the public that meat was “ diseased, rotten, and contaminated” (Willie).” This revelation shocked the, public which later led to the creation of the federal laws on food and safety. Sinclair strongly shows the failure of capitalism in the meatpacking industry which he viewed as inhumane, destructive, unjust, brutal, and violent (Willie).”

People in this story live in a very dis honest world, it's a rough life and it's almost impossible to live comfortably and make an honest living. Jurgis tried to be an honest working man but all the frauds and dishonest people around him made an influence. You see the dishonesty throughout the book cover to cover. Jurgis has several encounters with people who constantly try to cheat him out of his money or are dishonest about their intentions. You can see one encounter in the early pages of the book when jurgis and his family first arrive to america, they're looking for kettles and pots for there new house and the man that they bought them from cheated them out of a few pots. You can also see this late story when jurgis is trying to get his 100 dollars changed the man he asked him to change it. The man took the money from him and changed him 95 cents.

Several years before and after the turn the turn of the twentieth century, America experienced a large influx of European immigration. These new citizens had come in search of the American dream of success, bolstered by promise of good fortune. Instead they found themselves beaten into failure by American industry. Upton Sinclair wanted to expose the cruelty and heartlessness endured by these ordinary workers. He chose to represent the industrial world through the meatpacking industry, where the rewards of progress were enjoyed only by the privileged, who exploited the powerless masses of workers. The Jungle is a novel and a work of investigative journalism; its primary purpose was to inform the general public about the dehumanization

Jurgis and his family were faced with many predicaments related to these poor surroundings and circumstances. The family hastily saw that they must enter the competition forced upon them in a social Darwinist fashion. When he first arrived in Packingtown, Jurgis found work quickly in the meat packing industry because of his strong, young stature. As the years went by, however, and he grew plagued with injuries and financial troubles, Jurgis found work to be evermore difficult to obtain and hold. The social system cracked down on the family and offered nowhere for the Rudkus' to turn for help.

The deeper that Jurgis and his family go into the jungle, the more it takes from them. After the death of his son and a second round of prison, Jurgis loses contact with his remaining family. Packingtown comes to be less of a struggle and more of a battle ground as Jurgis becomes involved with crime and the politics of the city. Through his prison cellmate, Jack, Jurgis slowly becomes sucked into the darkness of corruption and soaks in the wealth of being a union patsy. When he again attacks Phil Connors, he loses his set up within the

An Irish union representative approaches him and tries to make him join the union for a portion of his pay. Jurgis is frantic at this and trusts that every man should work as he is able and receive just compensation for this work. Although Jurgis does not know what “laissez-faire” economics was, he had been around the world long enough to know that a man has to change the world for himself to be better in it. After being their for a while he realized his working condition were horrible and later joined the union.

As we start to separate the two characters, Jurgis didn’t get to see his family much because he was always working hard either getting the money to get to America or working hard in the stockyards trying to keep his family afloat. “ It was arranged that they should leave the following spring, and meantime Jurgis sold himself to a contractor for a certain time, and tramped nearly four hundred miles from home with a gang of men to work upon the railroad in Smolensk” (Sinclair 28). James was also a very hard working man, but his family was always there to support him and spend time with him in the evenings. At some point, they both suffer life-changing injuries either for the better or for the worse. Jurgis rolled his ankle in a stampede, which caused him to lose his job.

While the family is always able to gain the funds needed for the payments (before Jurgis is put in jail), the barely cover the price, leaving them with little food, a damaged house, and sickly family members (Sinclair). Clearly, the struggle of Jurgis’s family was insanely difficult, leading to decreased health, and even death, thus proving that poverty is a very serious social issue that damages the lives of many.

At the start of the book Jurgis believed in the capitalistic way of America that said if a person works harder, they can climb the ranks and make more and more money in doing so. This is what brought Jurgis and millions of other immigrants to America in the first place. Jurgis wanted the best possible lifestyle for him and his family, he believed that by working harder he would be able to earn more money and make a better living for his family. Jurgis is willing to do anything to be able to support his family, we see this when Jurgis takes the first job offered to him so he can start making money. “If we can’t stay together, that means we lost, we’ve given up.”

Living in the bottom of the class system, capitalism takes a toll on Jurgis and his family. His

When Jurgis and Ona first arrive in America they take a tour of the meat packing factories, there they see “[i]n [the] chutes the stream of animals was continuous; it was quite uncanny to watch them, pressing on to their fate, all unsuspicious a very river of death. Our friends were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors of human destiny; they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it all”(Sinclair 37). Even though Jurgis and Ona may not be able to see the parallel between them and the cattle, Sinclair foreshadows what their life will be like in Packingtown. The metaphor of the river of death shows how much like the cattle, the immigrants are often abused by the demands of consumerism.The cattle parallels the immigrants who arrive in Packingtown, they often arrive naive to their situation and their soon doom. To further exemplify the parallel between the workers and the cattle, literary critic Lynn Munro explains “[When] Jurgis is working at Packingtown...he is treated with indifference and contempt and, when supply exceeds demand, summarily discharged,’turned out to starve for doing his duty too well.’The brutalization is underscored by Sinclair’s use of […]parallels between the fate of the innocent livestock and the fate of the common working person”(Munro). Even though Jurgis tries to do his work the best he can, the owners of the factories just see him as another number, he is simply a lamb to the slaughter. Consumerism causes the meatpackers to barbarically slaughter thousands of cattle a day, which the workers are paid little for. Likewise, when Jurgis begins to work in the meat packing factory he has first hand experiences and hears rumors that “There were the butt-ends of smoked meat, and the scraps of corned beef, and all the odds and ends of the waste of the plants, that would be dumped into old

Jurgis and his family did not expect life to be so difficult United States. After hearing news of relatives striking rich in the US it became clear to them that life would be better if they moved there. Little did they know how difficult life would be for the working class in the early 1900s when capitalism was on a rise. People would work extreme hours with very little pay which would take a toll on their mental and physical health. A great example of this can be found in chapter 22 Page 178 line 23.

This story has a lot of minor characters but there are only about 8 that are the most significant. The protagonist is Jurgis and the antagonists are ultimately the people who commit fraud on his family. In general, most of the characters are flat and Jurgis seems to be the only one

The Jungle is Upton Sinclair’s novel that narrates the tragedy of Jurgis Rudkus and his family, Lithuanian immigrants who travel to America to work in Chicago’s meatpacking plants. It is a grim story of suffering and hardship. This family undergoes considerable difficulties that vary from the appalling and unsafe working conditions, to poverty and starvation, in addition to merciless businessmen who extort their money as well as dishonest politicians who generate laws that permit the existence of such scandal. Furthermore, the narrative traces Jurgis’ transformation when he meets the new political and economic system of socialism. The novel also uncovers, in one of its parts, the sickening and disgusting methods of the meat processing