The Economic Tension In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

American Dream or American Nightmare? Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. Mineola, New York.

Due to this, the children might be exposed to many different serious health problems. Several lawsuits have been in place because of this situation. The Jungle, written by Upton Sinclair, is about Jurgis Rudkus and his family, who are immigrants that move to Chicago from Lithuania in search of a better life. Once they get to America, they realize that life here was not all that it was cracked up to be. They get mistreated, and their daily lives become very challenging.

In the generations of the immigrant labor of a Slovak family, the Dorejacks demonstrates the tough labor in America. In the novel “Out This Furnace” a captivating, non-fiction story, Thomas Bell suggests that immigrant labor in the early days was tough and factors like labor inequality, the relationship between companies and politics, and essential money shaped immigrants freedom. In the mid-1800’s George Kracha fled his country, Austria, under the ruler of Frank Josef, because of the lack of money and employment, Kracha couldn’t sustain his wife and mother (p.3). Moreover, Kracha’s story began when he arrived in New York to White Hill, he then migrates to several other cities but still in America.

A muckraker is what is considered today an investigative journalist. In Sinclair’s case, he is considered a muckraker because he “wanted to investigate the meat-packing industry” in order to write about the working class, especially the immigrants working in them. As he began his investigation, however, he discovered dirty and unhealthy conditions in a workplace with unsafe standards. The applicable theme would be Culture and Society (CUL) because although he speaks about the working class and work conditions, he focuses on society as a whole. He writes “The Jungle” to describe to them the dirty, “unhealthy conditions, and general absence of meaningful safety standards in the workplace”. It is centered around the ideas and beliefs of proper work and health conditions.

The United States, during the 19th century, was a growing nation with much promise to prosper and urbanize. An integral aspect that contributed to the nation's expansion were immigrants, Individuals who were seeking more opportunities came from countries such as China, Germany, Ireland, etc. to work in the United States and earn a better living. In 1830, John Downe, an immigrant from England, is an example of a individual emigrating their home country to improve their life. John, in a letter to his wife trying to persuade his family to emigrate as well uses a mixture of tone, atmosphere, and pathos to envoke an overall hopeful but yet melancholy mood.

Upton Sinclair, a well-known muckraker of the early 1900s, wrote a novel called The Jungle, which highlighted the negative effects of capitalism and the corruption of society at the time. Sinclair wrote the novel with his primary goal being to bring awareness to society’s corruption and to push forward the ideas of socialism. To accomplish this, a connection is established between the reader and the protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, who struggles under a capitalist society. The antagonist is then presented as not one single character, but as the system of capitalism that oppresses workers like Jurgis and his family, as well as the economic structure of society that puts wealth and power into the hands of only a few individuals.

The most significant event of the twentieth-century emergencies the societies classes diversity and struggle. The novel, The Jungle penned by Upton Sinclair attempts to display the lower class economic and social challenges by exemplifying the difficulties of a Lithuanian immigrant family.The predicament situation of Jurgis and his family reveals the dark side of the capitalism, therefore, additionally, it revealed the bourgeoisie class dominance and exploitation of the proletariat class. Throughout the novel, Jurgis and his family encounter varied difficulties from being unable to find a proper job to several deaths followed one after another due to their harsh living conditions which result in the family separation nevertheless the children’s

The early 1900s came with an abundance of changes. There were multiple waves of immigration causing increased social separation. There was also increased industrialization. The increase in industrialization provided many jobs for the incoming immigrants. However, these immigrants took on a lot more than just a new job when they came to America. Immigrants faced harsh living and working conditions, racial strife, poverty, as well as social class issues. Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle explores many of these hardships immigrants had to face through the lives of Lithuanian Immigrants. Throughout his novel, Sinclair focuses on poverty and thoughts of what America was supposed to be like to portray hardships immigrants faced when coming to America.

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair follows the main character Jurgis Rudkus who is an immigrant from Lithuania. Jurgis immigrated to the United States and made his way to Chicago in order to follow the path of a legendary hometown name, Jokubas, who supposedly made a lot of money in the states. Upon reaching the United States and arriving in Chicago they realized it would be much harder to establish an income in a city they weren’t familiar with. Their luck changed when they happened upon the infamous Jokubas and found out he ran a local delicatessen in the stockyards in Chicago. Jokubas helped them find a place to sleep for the night in a boarding house while they used those first days to look for work in order to move to a nicer place of living.

Sinclair bases these struggles on things that happen to Jurgis and his family. One example that the author describes is how thousands of men wait outside the workplace just to get a chance at a job. “All day long the gates of the packing houses were besieged by starving and penniless men; they came, literally, by the thousands every single morning, fighting with each other for a chance for life…. Sometimes their faces froze, sometimes their feet and their hands; sometimes they froze all together— but still they came, for they had no other place to go” (Sinclair 92). Another example the author displays is when Ona, Jurgis’s wife, dies after giving birth.

“Sinclair presents socialism as Jurgis’ only hope—and the only hope of workers like him”(1110). Jurgis, the main character in Sinclair’s book, was the father in the rather unfortunate Lithuanian family. The family made the decision to travel to America because to them as outsiders, the country was known as “the promise land,” a place to go in search for hope and well being in their future. It

In “ The Jungle”, the author Upton Sinclair states that “ I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach”. This means that Sinclair wanted to muckrake the Meat Packing Industry to seek attention for the workers, but instead food became a bigger concern. The characters Jurgis, Ona, and Marija with fellow family members are Lithuanian immigrants who came to PackingTown in hope for a better future, however they came to realize that the whole town is run by capitalist. Although Sinclair intentionally uses metaphors and similes to depict the characters struggle in the horrible living and working conditions in Packingtown, his purpose is undermined and overlooked by his use of realism to depict the food process.

The life of immigrants living on the Lower East Side in the late 1800s early 1900s was tough. Coming to a new country itself is difficult. Immigrants didn’t have much to begin with. Most of them had jobs that allow them to barely live. Anzia Yezierska’s short story “The Lost ’Beautifulness’” depicts the immigration experience.

The image that Dorothea Lange captured of a fearful and desperate weather-beaten woman, with her three children, has become the ideal representation of the desperation and hardships that many families have gone through during the Great Depression in America. In the article “ The Harvest Gypsies”, John Steinbeck portrays the desperation when he declares “ The father and mother now feel that paralyzed with numbness with which the mind protects itself against too much sorrow and too much pain” (Steinbeck n. pag.).When no food could be grown and no money could be made, entire families packed up everything they had and began the journey to California. Without even looking back at the past, many families left their hometown farms , only to end

It was not an unkind glace. And yet, it said more plainly than words, ‘From where do you come? How did you get here?’” (Yezierska 214). When she was living on Hester Street, she was considered no more than a working-class immigrant girl, to a white American middle-class woman once she has her teaching job.