ipl-logo

Symbolism In The Jungle

729 Words3 Pages

Watch your every Step

Lost; in the city of Chicago Jurgis and his family hope to live better lives, but are in fact victims of the capitalistic community. This is the entertaining plot of the novel The Jungle by Upton Sinclair. Jurgis and his family set out from Lithuania to start new lives in America. They start off not too bad; they buy a house and end up having some extra money at the end of the month. As time passes while they live their daily lives, more and more happens that makes life harder and harder. Eventually they are crushed by the routine society creates for them and their lives break apart. Upton Sinclair uses a lot of symbols in this novel, like the slaughterhouses and even the title, to represent things in our daily life. This story …show more content…

Symbols play a huge role in making this story the allegory it is. One of these symbols is in the title itself: The Jungle. The real Jungle is a very dangerous place; you have to be careful and watch your every step. It is not different in the stockyards of Packingtown; the workers had to suffer work under extreme conditions, like the temperature in the different seasons and an extremely dangerous workplace. Once in a while people suffered form cuts, blood poisoning, and even death. These cuts were more than just a simple, small cut. As the book says, “Then your hand slips upon the blade, and there is a fearful gash…Twice now; within the last three years, Mikolas has been lying at home with blood poisoning—once for three

Show More
Related

  • The Meatpacking Industry In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

    360 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Social Reform In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

    1097 Words  | 5 Pages

    The Jungle, speaks of a fictional family who have immigrated to Chicago, the protagonist later ends up working in the meatpacking industry. Sinclair speaks of the way meats are packed and processed, large companies corrupt ideologies, along with the dire conditions that their workers undergo daily. He wrote of the sickening events, depicting them in detail “men fell into the vats; and when

    Read More

  • Rhetorical Analysis Of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

    159 Words  | 1 Pages

    “With one member trimming beef in a cannery, and another working in a sausage factory, the family had a first-hand knowledge of the great Packingtown swindles” (par.1). This statement from Upton Sinclair’s book The Jungle, introduces trust from a family because of their own personal knowledge . The Jungle, features an immigrant family trying to survive in 1900’s Chicago meat packing district. In the story, Sinclair’s goal is to expose the miserable life of immigrants who work in factories.

    Read More

  • Upton Sinclair's The Jungle And The Meatpacking Industry

    601 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Jungle exposed the way workers were treated in the meatpacking industry. It stated that they were exposed to filthy workplaces, in which the smell would be outrageous. They were forced to work through these smells for non-stop hours. In addition, the smell would come from the meat itself. The smell would bring in rodents, such as rats, into the factories.

    Read More

  • Working Conditions In The Jungle

    634 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Bosses squeezed and drained the life of those men. In the book The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair he described the life of a struggling family try to work and stay alive in the filth. The working conditions in the factories were unsafe, unsanitary and people made little. The purpose of this book was for people to become socialist other than capitalist.

    Read More

  • Examples Of Struggles In The Jungle

    2149 Words  | 9 Pages

    A Time for Struggle and Change Upton Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, depicts the struggles of Lithuanian immigrants as they worked and lived in Chicago’s Packingtown at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. The United States experienced an enormous social and political transformation; furthermore, the economy, factories, and transportation industry grew faster than anyone had ever seen. Immigrants and migrants were attracted to city life for its promise of employment and their chance at the American Dream. The poor working class had little to no rights, and they grappled with unfair business practices, unsafe working conditions, racism, Social Darwinism, class segregation, xenophobia, political corruption, strikes, starvation, poor housing,

    Read More

  • The Economic Tension In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

    1899 Words  | 8 Pages

    Upton Sinclair portrays the economic tension in the United States during the late 19th and early 20th centuries through his novel “The Jungle”. He used the story of a Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis Rudkus, to show the harsh situation that immigrants had to face in the United States, the unsanitary and unsafe working conditions in the meatpacking plants, as well as the tension between the capitalism and socialism in the United States during the early 1900s. In the late 19th century and early 20th centuries, there were massive immigrants move into the United States, and most of them were from Europe. The protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, like many other immigrants, have the “America Dream” which they believe America is heaven to them, where they can

    Read More

  • Socialism In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

    778 Words  | 4 Pages

    Corruption runs rampant in Packingtown, the town where Jurgis and his newly immigrated family work in the meatpacking industry. The Jungle’s heavy-handed symbolism alludes to the theme of corruption. For example, the animals represent the workers themselves; while the workers are the cattle, “each in a separate pen … leaving them with no room to turn around,” the wealthy capitalists are the “‘knockers,’ … watching for a chance to deal a blow” (Sinclair, 39). In other words, the capitalists are taking the workers lives

    Read More

  • How Does Sinclair Present The Abuse Of Workers In The Meat Packing Industry

    451 Words  | 2 Pages

    In this novel, Upton Sinclair had one main goal in mind, to display the abuse of immigrants who worked in the meat packing industry in the early 20th century. The immigrants who worked in this industry were often exploited because of their lack of English language skills and unfamiliarity with American laws and customs as a whole. “They use everything about the hog except the squeal” (Sinclair 38), Sinclair writes this to suggest the workers are treated like animals because every single part of their body is used, but their voice. The conditions were extremely dangerous and unsanitary, consequently demoralizing every worker. They had long hours, low pay, and ordinarily frequent injuries.

    Read More

  • The Importance Of Knowledge In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

    1021 Words  | 5 Pages

    When Upton Sinclair, a progressive era muckraker, wrote The Jungle in 1906, he was attempting to bring knowledge of the horrific conditions in Packingtown to the average citizen. His revelations on the terrors of Packingtown helped to slowly improve the lives of the immigrants. Sinclair’s pursuit of knowledge relates to the slowly growing knowledge of the characters in The Jungle. Throughout the story the characters find themselves in many tragic circumstances that could have been more easily avoided if they had been more aware of their surroundings. The immigrants are full of a false hope for success that disillusions the reality of their life.

    Read More

  • The Jungle: The Corruption Of American Meatpacking Industry

    216 Words  | 1 Pages

    The Jungle was written by Upton Sinclair and published in 1906. I chose this book because it’s been mentioned in multiple History classes I’ve taken. I took it upon interest mainly because it is about the brutal and unfair treatment of immigrants in labor and because it exposed the meat industry. (it exposed both). Sinclair strives to expose the danger in capitalism by vividly describing and exposing the ranging and brutal treatment of immigrant laborers who searched to live the American dream but found misfortune instead.

    Read More

  • 'The Jungle' By Upton Sinclair

    601 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair was an expose on the life of those who lived in Packingtown, Chicago. Packingtown was where most of the people who was looking for work lived, it was a very crowded city. Job openings were scarce and most of the jobs were very unsafe. Most of the people in this part of town were poor, so they did not really have much doubts of food,. The Jungle exposed the horrific work conditions, the poor food quality, and the deceitfulness of the business owners.

    Read More

  • Symbolism In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

    1433 Words  | 6 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Meatpacking Workers In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

    1060 Words  | 5 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Jungle Critical Analysis

    1202 Words  | 5 Pages

    During the time period of the 1900’s, the meat packaging industry in Chicago, as Sinclair mentions in his novel, The Jungle, was a very unsanitary and extremely dangerous workplace that lacked much more than just a few safety precautions. Simple things, such as enforcing hand washing or workers’ rights were unheard of in the working environment. It is clear that Upton Sinclair was trying to expose the worker’s horrendous labor conditions in order to improve their situation, along with the introduction of socialism. Upton Sinclair, in his novel, talks about how a Lithuanian immigrant by the name of Jurgis Rudkus, and his family, travel to Chicago trying to make ends meet. However, they soon realize Chicago was not the place for that.

    Read More

More about Symbolism In The Jungle

Open Document