The Jungle

A detailed Summary of The 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

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. !

e took her to a brothel and raped her. This is a prime example of a common thing that happened in Chicago in the early 1900's. A worker accepted sexual abuse in order to keep her job. Due to the lack of available jobs, she needed to keep hers to be able to help support the family. Jurgis also needed to keep his job to support the family. As the main wage earner, he needed to immediately find another source of income when he was laid off of his previous one. However, when Jurgis joined the Union, he was blacklisted by factory owners and was not hired by anyone. As people try and fight the capitalist system, the tyrannical bosses put them down. Immigrants expecting to support a family had no place in society in the early decades of the twentieth century as is explained by Jurgis's cellmate Jack Duane. The "dog-eat-dog" method is again emphasized with this aspect.

y capitalistic greedy companies were prevalent. Another incident that shows the lack of job security is when Jurgis starts another job, but is injured. After six weeks he is again denied his job because of a replacement. This frequently happened in the time period of The Jungle and when strikes would occur, it was almost definite that their job would be gone due to strikebreakers or "scabs" (usually immigrants who would work for less money). Jurgis's greatest difficulty throughout the novel was to keep a job for more than a month.

Finding a steady job in the early 19

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

Category: Novels