Jungle

A detailed Summary of Jungle

In Upton Sinclair's Jungle, the author attempts to make known the evils of the industries and capitalist businesses in Chicago in the early 1900's. The main character Jurgis was part of a lower class immigrant family from Lithuania that came to the US for a new start on life. They explain their illusion of the many chances that the country gives and decide to try and do as well as their friend Jokubas Szedvilas had done. However, as Jurgis starts work; as well as the rest of the family including Antanas, Ona, and Marija; they discover that the "land of the free" is not as forgiving as the naif had expected. Sinclair shows Jurgis's disillusionment and counters them with problems of the Chicago meat-packing industry such as the poor working conditions, gross employee exploitation, job insecurities, and most abundantly the drive of capitalism.

As Szedvilas is giving the Rudkuses a tour of Durham's meat-packing plant, he tells them that behind the closed doors are secret rooms and such that the company executives do not want the public to see. Sinclair is hinting with this statement that later in the novel the family will experience crude working conditions that prove to defeat the new lifestyle the Rudkuses envisioned. Howe

When Jurgis first arrives at Durham's after he comes to America, Sinclair makes it known the circumstances of his job even though Jurgis is naive to them himself. He notes the floors were covered in a half-inch pool of blood and "must have made the floor slippery, but no one could have guessed this by watching the men at work". By creating Jurgis with blinders on his eyes, Sinclair is able to show the roughest experiences until the main character finally sees what is going on. The men are working amidst all of the blood and "meat slush", but pay no attention to it as they serve the unhealthy capitalist economy. As Jurgis is beginning to see that America is not all he visioned it to be, he is pushed along when Ona, his wife, failed to come home from work. She lies to him saying she stayed at a friend's house because it was too cold. But Jurgis finally gets her to confess that Connor, a boss of Durham's, threatened to fire her entire family unless she submitted to him. H!

nd being made into lard. Ona's mother, Elzbieta gets a job in a sausage factory. She sits in a damp cellar amid "a sickening odor of moist flesh, twisting sausages into links. She is so busy, she has no time to look up at the gallery, from which visitors stare at her, as at some wild beast in a menagerie." The vivid use of imagery by Sinclair easily suggests to the reader of the horrible working conditions that she experiences. He calls her a "wild beast" that creates the picture of an animal in a cage. Dede Antanas, Jurgis's father, experiences the same conditions. The damp pickling room that he works in leaves him with a respiratory problem that makes it hard to talk without coughing. After a couple of jobs, Jurgis continues to find work with the same problems. When a fellow worker gets splattered with molten iron, Jurgis rushes to help him, injuring his hand in the process. However, without regard to his heroism, he is forced to take off 8 days of work without pay. !

Finally, Sinclair shows his greatest discontent with society when he depicts the capitalistic society. The disgruntledness begins early in the book when describing the family's passage to the "new start" in America. In Lithuania, he worked long and hard in the filthy conditions on railroads to earn enough money for his family to come to the US. He was just able to make this money and received loans from gamblers and loansharks. However, he did not intend to pay thi

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Approximate Word count = 1643
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: Novels