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Empathy In The Jungle And Mending Wall

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Daniel H. Pink explains that “Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.” It is this empathy that allows people to care about others and feel for them as they go through suffering and sorrow. The excerpts from Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” create different emotions in readers. Poets such as Robert Frost leave the meaning of their works up to the interpretation of the reader, but novelists such as Upton Sinclair evoke more empathy in readers than poets by stating events clearly.
“Mending Wall” written by Robert Frost instills little empathy in the first …show more content…

The Jungle portrays the harsh conditions in the meatpacking industry in cities like Chicago in the early 1900s. In chapter ten, it reads, “All day long the rivers of hot blood poured forth, until, with the sun beating down, and the air motionless, the stench was enough to knock a man over; all the old smells of a generation would be drawn out by this heat-for there was never any washing of the walls and rafters and pillars, and they were caked with the filth of a lifetime.” The image of the rivers of hot blood pouring forth makes readers shudder and feel so bad for these people who had to work there. Sinclair says the following about those who worked at the killing beds: “The men who worked on the killing beds would come to reek with foulness, so that you could smell one of them fifty feet away; there was simply no such thing as keeping decent, the most careful man gave it up in the end, and wallowed in uncleanliness. There was not even a place where a man could wash his hands, and the men ate as much raw blood as food at dinnertime.” The imagery of “reaking with foulness,” eating blood, and never being clean helps readers see how terrible it was for these men, and they feel empathy for

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