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The Role Of Socialism In Sinclair's The Jungle

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Sinclair’s book The Jungle shows the hard situations that people in the time period unfortunately had. With many families coming into America, people were coming from all over to work in these jobs. The story follows Jergis, an immigrant who gets married and gets a new job at the meat packaging plant in Packingtown. His entire family moves out of a very small apartment and into a bigger and nicer house. Once they miss a payment however, they get evicted from this house and have to return to living in very harsh conditions. The entire family struggles to find good work and even the children have to get jobs to help support the family. The family struggles with illnesses from the harsh conditions and the very extreme cold in Chicago at the time. After devastation hits and Jergis loses his family, and he struggles after getting out of jail. He has a very hard time with losing his wife and eventually, both of his kids. He becomes a drunk and has more trouble with his work and even has to beg on the streat for his money just to barely get by. …show more content…

Sinclair tried to make this book promote socialism and discermish the capitalism system. He had hoped that this book will not only convince a few of the wealthy readers, but also convince the common people to push for more socialism. He had also written this book with an attempt to connect so much with women. This book was meant to connect more with women because he felt that they would be a bigger audience. He also made Jurgis's wife have a very difficult with her work conditions, including her boss who had taken advantage of her and and her

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All the elements and conflicts presented in the book leads to the theme of socialism. Upton Sinclair is a supporter of the socialist move. To the point of writing this work is to elicit sympathy for the working class and build support for socialism. Everything within the book is criticizing capitalism; the only remedy for the evils of capitalism is socialism (Sinclair). In capitalism, the upper-class keep getting richer by exploiting the lower working class, leaving a wide gap between the wealthy and the impoverished.

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Upton Sinclair reflects the reality of the people during the late 1800’s in his novel The Jungle. In his novel, Sinclair wants to promote Socialism by showing how people lived in the meatpacking plant and under a corrupt government. The inhuman working conditions, combined with the lack of hygiene and a corrupt government, made trying to make a living a total hardships for the low class and the immigrants. The Jungle takes place in Packingtown, Chicago, where the employees work under horrible conditions.

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Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" is a novel that depicts the lives of Lithuanian immigrants working in the meatpacking industry in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century. The jungle refers to the harsh and unforgiving environment of the meatpacking district, where workers are subjected to dangerous working conditions, unsanitary living quarters, and exploitation by powerful meatpacking companies. The book opens with Jurgis Rudkus, a strong and proud Lithuanian immigrant, arriving in Chicago with his family. They quickly find work in the meatpacking district, but soon discover that the reality of their new life is far harsher than they had imagined.

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In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Jurgis and his family attempt to survive in a malicious society. In this jungle of a town, rotten meat is being packaged in order to save money. Throughout the novel, the immigrants are faced with greedy capitalists who take advantage of the family’s ignorance and naivety in order to make money. The symbols of corruption, a jungle-like setting, and the tension between family and a work-based lifestyle transparently contribute to the unifying theme of anti-capitalism. In other words, this book is not art; this book is propaganda.

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However, readers at the time were not very concerned about the petty immigrants living on the lower rung of society. Rather, they cared about what affected them most: the condition of the meat they were eating-- and had been eating-- for years, that were produced by some of the very factories mentioned in Sinclair’s novel. For the majority of The Jungle’s readers, the fact that poor immigrants were being exploited was not bothersome. Instead, the fact that the food that readers had been eating for years contained the power to kill them seemed shocking, pushing the nation into a worried frenzy. Readers were disgusted by the facts they were reading, catalyzing the creation of administrations like the FDA.

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Many times, workers didn’t have time to have a social life outside of work. Sinclair writes, “There are able-bodied men here who work from early morning until late at night, in ice-cold cellars with a quarter of an inch of water on the floor-men who for six or seven months in the year never see the sunlight from Sunday afternoon till the next Sunday morning” (Sinclair 13). Although these are extreme examples presented by the author, it shows us that they were real issues dealt with at the time. Along with long hours, pay for the workers was almost unlivable.

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The Jungle In the literary work, The Jungle, the author, Upton Sinclair makes a commentary on the deceitful and dark truth of the American dream. This was achieved by using the canned meat that was produced in Packingtown as a symbol to represent the dream that all the immigrants had about their new lives in America. As the story progresses, the reader, along with the protagonist, Jurgis will discover that the American dream lies cloaked behind a shroud of beautiful lies that masks the vile truths that are the American dream and the canned “beef” processed by the corrupt meat business in Packingtown.

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