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Review Of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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The Jungle is a story that revolves around the protagonist Jurgis Rudkus and his family, the Lithuanian immigrant who came to America to lead a better life and worked at meatpacking plants of early 20th century Chicago. The story showcases the hardship that they underwent due to the harsh and bad working condition, poverty, starvation and being cheated by unjust people agents, eventually losing all their money. The Jungle provides us ways to look at the unfettered capitalism that prevailed in the early 20th century. This book also exposes the corruption, inequality, unjustness, sickness and slavery that existed in the society. Jurgis started off firmly believing on his American dream of having a better life where he would work hard and earn lots of money. He took up work in a meatpacking plant where he had to sweep blood and body parts of slaughtered cattle. The job was unsafe and the conditions were bitter but he continued working a he was happy to get a job so fast. In the packinghouses the condition were deplorable, every part of the animal was used to make profit. Even spoiled meat was marked as good and sold out to public. The workers did not …show more content…

Ona and Teta also took jobs in order to meet ends of the family. Ona was also forced into sexual relations by her factory boss in return of the job for which she was employed. When Jurgis came to know about it, he goes to his wife’s factory and thrashed that man. After an unfair trial Jurgis was thrown into jail and was not able to work which pushed the family into a greater economic depression. This shows that how easy it was for the higher class of the society to commit a crime and still get out of it easily whereas the poor sections of the society suffers the most. The higher classes of the society held strong connection which makes mockery of law and order, thus spreading unjustness in the

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