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Sinclair's The Jungle
Upton Sinclair's describes the struggles of immigrant life in his novel The Jungle. The book opens with a wedding scene between Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite, a young couple from Lithuania. They celebrate with their extended family in the backroom of a saloon in the Packingtown district of Chicago, the new home of this collection of Lithuanian immigrants. The story then switches to the arduous journey the Lithuanian families undertook in order to make a better life for themselves in America. However, when they arrive in Chicago's Packingtown, the living conditions are filthy and oppressive. Jurgis readily finds work but his father is unable to find employment. Ona's family has trouble making ends meet, and Ona eventually finds work wrapping ham. Jurgis and Ona eventually get married, which brings the plot back to the opening wedding scene. Unfortunately, the young couple was expecting the traditional monetary gifts from relatives at the wedding, but receives little...
To add to their financial troubles, the conditions of the slaughterhouses and packing industry become almost unbearable, especially during the harsh Chicago winters. The poor living and working conditions eventually break the body and spirit of Jurgis's father Dede Antanas. Eventually, Jurgis becomes active in his union, learns English, and becomes a citizen. Ona's cousin Marija falls in love with a musician. However, truly happy times are hard to come by in Packingtown; Marija loses her job -- twice -- and Ona's pregnancy weakens her already delicate health. Ona dies after prematurely giving birth to her second child.
Ona's death and the increasingly oppressive, unjust, and dangerous working conditions break Jurgis and he turns to alcohol for solace. He wanders and becomes a tramp and a beggar, abandoning his family. When he tries to get his life back together, he is only met with more obstacles. He lands himself in jail several times…
Social and cultural capital enable access to educational institutions. Social and cultural capital also offer access to positions of power within organizations. The menial labor jobs that the Lithuanian immigrants do thwart social mobility. The myth of the American Dream creates the illusion that capitalist social structures are beneficial and immutable. Immigrants like those depicted in the Jungle believe that hard work alone can lead to upward social mobility and
Jungle, Upton Sinclair describes horrific conditions within the meatpacking plants, and writes of men falling into tanks and being ground up with animal parts and then made into lard (Sinclair pp). He writes that it was Jurgis's job to slide the cows into the trap, calves and all, and on the floor below they took out these slunk calves and butchered them for meat and even used the skins
Jungle Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle is perhaps best known for its historical and journalistic contributions, because the book opened the public's eyes to the horrors of the American meatpacking industry, and particularly its appalling health and safety standards. However, Sinclair's novel also represents an aesthetic and ideological advancement that is often overlooked in favor of the book's somewhat more dramatic accounts of life inside a slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant.
Jungle Updated Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, is a worthwhile piece of literature that can contribute to the understanding of human development within the last century. It is a story of an immigrant family who experiences incredibly difficult and trying hardships in early 20th-century America. The purpose of this essay is to contrast the author's thesis of the story with my own personal interpretation of this novel. It is my understanding that
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle The Use of Style to Craft an Argument: Upton Sinclair's the Jungle "Sinclair uses language effectively, and in a variety of ways, to shape his characters and develop his themes" and thus effectively created a novel that outraged the public and created the beginnings of reform in American industry (Oatman 30). Upton Sinclair's most infamous novel, The Jungle, is a story of an immigrant worker forced into a
Jungle and Fast Food Nation The American meat industry has been a source of public contention ever since industrialization, periodically brought to the fore by investigations into and revelations of unsafe labor and food safety practices. In particular, Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle reveals the realities of the meat industry at the beginning of the twentieth century, and Eric Schlosser's book Fast Food Nation reexamines this same industry nearly a hundred