Summary Of The Jungle By Upton Sinclair

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century (The Progressive Era), there was an influx of Southern and Eastern Europeans into the United States. A majority of these immigrants were uneducated and illiterate, but because of the lack of immigration laws, naturalization became fairly easy for them. In the book The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, Sinclair portrays the strenuous life of an immigrant family from Lithuania. The main character, Jurgis, comes to America with his father, Antanas, his wife, Ona, and a couple other people from Ona’s family. The book serves to portray the horrible life of low class workers and to denounce capitalism. Throughout the book, Sinclair subtly depicts the flaws in capitalism, and attempts to persuade the

By reading this book, a reader basically just appreciates all the benefits of socialism. However, Sinclair fails to mention all the benefits of capitalism. The book is extremely biased toward socialism, but that is because he wanted to convince readers that socialism is the best form of government. In addition, a reader also learns about the horrors of meat packing. In class, we learned about how the meatpacking industry was one of the most disgusting of its time. This is proven in the book when Sinclair goes into detail about some of the jobs that the family has to perform to survive. For example, Sinclair states “When they had speared out all they could reach, they emptied the vat on the floor, and then with shovels scraped up the balance and dumped it into the truck. This floor was filthy” (5,7) and “there was a trap in the pipe, where all the scraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every few days it was the old man's task to clean these out, and shovel their contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meat!” (5,7) Clearly, these practices were repulsive, and to top it off some of the work was extremely dangerous, and could easily kill a person. The workers’ wages were also fairly low, and they often got scammed out of their own money. At one point, Marija fought with her boss for her fair salary, and got herself fired(10, 4). Because of the abundance of workers, workers were fairly expendable. We also learned in class that it was around this time that brothels began to pop up, and toward the end of the book, we find out that Marija has become a prostitute to support the family (27,9). She was basically trapped in that brothel, because the Madam got her addicted to morphine. Similarly, Ona was forced into prostitution by her boss (If she didn’t accept, no one in her family could work in the meatpacking business.), and when Jurgis found out,