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Upton Sinclairs book The Jungle
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is fictional story that deals with a very real and shocking reality associated with turn of the century American immigrants. It is a story of a Lithuanian man, Jurgis Rudkus, who comes to America in search of the “dream” with his new fiancй and her family. In their search, the party actually finds something totally different. What they truly discover is a world of corruption, injustice, and poverty. All of these crimes of humanity are found in the place where they live and work, PACK-ING-TOWN!
Packingtown is a world unlike any I have previously read about. The experience of the Lithuanian immigrants is one of horror and dismay. The world in which they live is most certainly ruthless, unscrupulous, and morally adrift. Everywhere they turn, they are being taken advantage of. It seems that everyone is surviving off the misfortunes of another, some with out even knowing. This is clearly seen when the book states, “It was a striking circumstance that Jonas, too, had gotten his job by the misfortunes of some other person.” As soon as the Lithuanians left for America they were in some way being cheated. On the ship and in New York, people they were theoretically supposed to trust swindled them from their money. Being scammed by the people you should trust seems to a recurring theme throughout The Jungle. The people of Packingtown were in many ways like the animals that they slaughtered everyday. The book portrays this symbolism when the narrator articulates the experience of the immigrant’s tour of the slaughterhouse:
“they were so innocent, they came so very trustingly: and they were so human in their protest-and so perfectly within their! They had done nothing to deserve it: and it was adding insult to injury… Each one of those hogs was a separate creature. Some were white hogs, some were black: some were brown, some were spotted; some were old, some young; some were long and lean; some were monstrous. And each of them had an individuality of his own, a will of his own, a hope and a heart’s desire; each was full of self-confidence, of self-importance, and a since of dignity.”
Though the hogs were individuals that might have been treated that way on some distant farm by a poor farmer, to the slaughterers they were nothing more than a piece of meat. In the same way, the workingmen of Packingtown were all separate creatures created by God but to their employers they were nothing more than a replaceable part to an enormous mass-producing machine. The animal’s and the workingman’s suffering was never taken into account. The only thing the packer considered was how much money he could squeeze out of the both of them.
Poverty and ostracism was an immense problem the Lithuanian immigrants faced in their new home. The family, like most others in “Packingtown,” was very poor and lived from month to month. The workingman, through honest hard work, could not improve his condition [next page]