The Jungle Book Summary

Jurgis and his family in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle come to America in search of higher wages and a successful life. They are quickly met with disappointment and despair as Jurgis tries to establish himself in America. The crime and corruption ridden city of Chicago and the meatpacking industry take advantage of Jurgis’s family, inflicting death and poverty upon them. The Jungle’s portrayal of immigrant life in Chicago exposes the “American Dream” as a capitalistic exploitation of immigrants. Universally praised character traits help place the entirety of the blame for the incidents on the environment that Jurgis and his family are forced into.

The Jungle is a novel about a Lithuanian family working in the stockyards in Chicago. The writer depicts the struggle for survival in the poor working condition and how they must endure hardships and overwhelming work. Furthermore, the novel provides a detailed description of the meatpacking company in the early twenty-century and the life of many immigrants. Later, the family

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair is about Lithuanian immigrants moving to the United States seeking the American Dream. When they arrive, the family is faced with many hardships. Jurgis Rudkus’ family lives in an overcrowded city called Packingtown, in poverty. The Jungle tells readers about the struggles of being an immigrant in poverty and the horrors of the meat packing industry in the early 20th century. Sinclair’s goal was to make people aware of how hard immigrants had to work in terrible conditions. The public, though, was more concerned with the issues in the meat packing industry. Many people were now speaking out about food quality and working conditions.

Upon reading Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, it can easily be seen that there were numerous injustices occurring within the early 1900s Chicago government. He wrote the book in 1906 after spending six months gathering research on the lives of poor, low class, immigrant families. With this information, he published his first book, The Jungle, through which he displays the hardships a immigrant family faces when they move to America. He chose the meat packing industry in the city of Chicago as his backdrop for this story, and while the names of the characters are fictional, most of the story is based on his real observations. He originally wrote the book trying to “set forth the breaking of human hearts by a system which exploits the labor of men and women for profit,” but people took it the wrong way, and Sinclair explained this misinterpretation when he says “I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” (NCBI) By this, he means that he wanted the American people to see the plight of the immigrants but instead the general public was more upset by the unsanitary condition of the meat they were ingesting. While Sinclair may not have achieved his original goal, his book did in fact have a significant impact; an impact that still effects the American people of today. It led to the creation of the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906 which is the predecessor to the modern day FDA (Young 231) (US Food). The Jungle shows the corruption in the Chicago government through the main character Jurgis and his trial, the raping of his wife Ona, and the unsanitary conditions in the meat factories where he worked.

Based on chapter 13 of How To Read Literature Like A Professor I believe The Jungle is a political work centered on the contrasts between capitalism and socialism. Upton Sinclaire uses Jurgis to represent immigrants and the working class, making the character more relatable helps to get the authors point across to the audience. Wether it be politically or otherwise, the story is meant to change us and in turn change society. In the case of The Jungle , Sinclaire uses symbolism and propaganda like antics to express his ideas both through Jurgis and the story itself. This novel being programmatic (pushing a single cause, concern or party position) supports socialist ideas and causes. For example, in The Jungle, Jurgis is constantly oppressed

Upton Sinclair was a prolific writer. Growing up he was very intelligent and began writing novels at an early age. Sinclair was influenced by social injustice and socialism, which encouraged him to publish The Jungle. The Jungle is a social criticism about a family immigrating from Lithuania to America in search for a better life. The main characters Jurgis and Ona are a couple from the rural countryside of Lithuania. They immigrated with their family to Packingtown, Chicago where the meat-packing industry is located. The family expected to immigrate to a nice wealthy city but settled in an overcrowding boardinghouse in a poor neighborhood. They experienced many obstacles and maltreatment of capitalism that damaged many aspects of the family’s life. Throughout the novel, Sinclair reveals the struggle to pursue the American Dream. Sinclair’s main point in the book was to reveal the issues of capitalism and wage slavery.

The Jungle is a about a family of lithuanian immigrants that leave their hometown to come to America because they hope to make a better life for themselves, and they believe America is the place to do it. They arrive in Packingtown a city in Chicago where they are put to work in the meatpacking plants. Once there, they learned that the dreamed they had imagined is not turning out the way they hoped it would. Still Jurgis and his family do not give up hope, but eventually like every other family in the city of Packingtown they to lose any hope they had.

In 1904 Upton Sinclair went undercover in the Chicago stockyards. He immersed himself in the meatpacking culture and studied the inner workings of one of the world’s largest industries. Through about seven weeks of posing as a worker, he had gathered enough material for his greatest work and a catalyst for change in the 20th century. Sinclair compiled his experiences to create his classic novel The Jungle. The book follows a family of Lithuanian immigrants and their pursuit of the American Dream. Because this novel is a forerunner in the field of investigative journalism, the scenes and events are based off of real life observations and research. The experiences may not be exact stories from people but the circumstances were realistic. Through

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair in the first chapter it talks about how having a wedding can cost as much as $300. That’s not a lot. The family in the story is not rich, they still act as if they are. I feel as if my family likes to live alike, this as we binge on Christmas presents even when we're flat broke. The book talks about slaughtering cattle,pigs, along with sheep this necessarily does not remind me of my family’s farm as we do not slaughter our animals, despite it reminds myself, as it has to do with livestock.

Upton Sinclair in his novel The Jungle made it clear that the family consisting of Jurgis, Ona, Teta Elzbieta, Marija, and others, were chasing after an almost nonexistent “American dream” in hope for happiness and money in their lives. Instead of a land of acceptance and opportunity, they find a place of prejudice and exploitation; instead of a country where hard work and morality lead to success, they find a place where only moral corruption, crime, and graft enable one to succeed materially (The Jungle: Themes, Motifs & Symbols). The hypocrisy of the American dream hit the family will full force and drove them into the ground.

The Jungle begins with Jurgis Rudkus, our main character who is a recent Lithuanian immigrant, getting married in Chicago. After his marriage, Jurgis and several of his relatives find work in Packingtown, a section of Chicago where meat industry is king. His family rents a shoddy house forcing more of them to find work in Packingtown. After he joins a union, he begins to see the political corruption that

The Jungle is centered on Chicago in the late 19th century to early 20th century. Jurgis, a robust and strong-willed young man, immigrates to the United States in an attempt to obtain a better standard of living. On the way there, shameless criminals hoping to gain easy money, cheat them out of their already limited budget. After arriving to Chicago, they are abhorred by the filthy conditions of the city and the abundance of factories polluting the air with grimy smog. Their illusions of the class mobility in America are quickly shattered when the family suffers from numerous scams, filthy working conditions, political corruption, hazardous food, and crippling low pay. Nonetheless, the family struggles onward to make their living in the cutthroat

He was happy and announced it to everyone in his house. His position was at the slaughter house killing floor; his duty was killing the pigs and cows for meats. As the same time, Marija, Ona's cousin also found a job, her job was painting the cans of beef. Jonas gets a meatpacking plant position as well. Furthermore, Antanas got a job too, pickling meats. So far, this family got 4 members that had a job and could support the family finance. All the members seemed happy and cheerful. Therefore, they tried to buy a house with down payment in it. The wages of the house seemed much higher than before, that was why they still feel stress a little bit. Moreover, one of the neighbor told them that the down payment house was not guarantee anything that if they just missed like one or two months payment , the family will get kick out of the house. This was even make them get worst, but they thought that they were doing find. Everything seemed under control

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

The representation of animals within Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is symbolic of the colonisation of India, advocating the agenda of the British colonisers through the theme of imperialist oppression. This is particularly evident within the Mowgli story Kaa’s Hunting as well as the animal story “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”. Within the Mowgli story, the theme of imperialist oppression is conveyed primarily through the ‘Law of the Jungle’ as Kipling uses Baloo, the Bandar-log and Shere Khan symbolically as justification. Animals within “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi” embody this representation also, reflecting this demonstration of imperialist oppression despite the lack of pronounced law.