The Rudkus Family In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

Throughout Upton Sinclair’s magnum opus, The Jungle, we see the Rudkus family and their struggles as they live through the hard times before the Great Depression. While the title of the novel represents a more animalistic idea, the novel never tells of anything that relates to the title, unless you look at the story from another perspective. In this novel we clearly see the Social Darwinist idea, which is the theory that only the strong will survive, in full effect because in The Jungle we see a literal jungle in the form of the lives of Jurgis and the Rudkus family. Through the chapters we see the attempt of the Rudkus family to move higher up in the “animal kingdom” yet they never seem to exceed. This is the story of a non native species

We first see the example of a strong person surviving in the form of Jurgis who throughout the novel is represented as a very strong person, this is shown at the beginning of the novel when it’s stated, “Jurgis could take up a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound quarter of beef and carry it into a car without a stagger,” this shows how strong Jurgis really is, making him a good fit for surviving the jungle.(Sinclair 2) On the other hand, there are the Rudkus’ that can’t survive because they are not strong enough to, this is best seen when referring to Dede Antanas. When being described in the novel the common theme for Dede Antanas is that he is frail and old best described when said, “Not more than sixty, but you would think he was eighty,” this has been caused by the work Antanas was able to apply for in America, which caused him to become weak, while also changing him down to how old he appears to be, this is the main factor in the fact that he can’t survive in his new environment, eventually leading to the death of Antanas. (6) This shows how the strong are able to survive, while the weak will be left behind, like in a jungle and in Social Darwinism where only the strong can survive, but there is another huge factor in surviving the

The strongest analogy used to describe this is when comparing the description of the hogs coming through the slaughterhouse to the immigrants coming into America during the time of the novel. In the novel this event is described as, “brought about ten thousand head of cattle every day,” showing how many immigrants, represented by cattle, these factories would receive looking for work. Then there is the description of how the immigrants are used to there limits then disposed of after they have either been injured or just lost their job, this is shown when said, “They use everything about the hog except the squeal,” this represent how much of the immigrants use of before eventually firing them or losing their job. (27) With the description of how the businesses use the hogs as well as how indispensable the cattle are and that comparison with the immigrants shows how the immigrants are literal animals in the eyes of the