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Upton Sinclair's The Jungle
her excuse seems flimsy Jurgis follows her and confronts her. She tells him that Connor raped her and that he threatened to ruin the family. Jurgis attacks Connor and is imprisoned. He realizes his actions didn’t help the situation and he is remorseful. Jurgis meets the suave Jack Duane in prison, who introduces him to Packingtown’s nether world. The family all manages to loose their jobs while Jurgis is in prison and Stanislovas is sent to ask Jurgis for money. Jurgis gives him all he has, fourteen cents.
When Jurgis finally is released from prison he finds that a new family is moved into his house and that the family is back at the boarding house where they started. As soon as he walks in the door he hears Ona’s screams as she has gone into premature labor. He tries to get a midwife to help her, but both the child and Ona die. Jurgis drinks his sadness away. Marija convinces him to go on and be a good role model for Antanas. He seeks work, but because he attacked Connor he has been blacklisted. He goes downtown to find work, and is at first pleased with the superior wages, but then he is laid off after nine days. Back in Packingtown he finds that he may get a job at a steel mill because of the kindness of a social worker, moved by the family’s story. Although the steel mill is fifteen miles away and the job is hazardous, Jurgis takes it and lives at the boarding house during the week, and only sees his son on weekends. He is injured again on the job and the silver lining of his eight days without work recovering is that he sees his son. He returns to work happy. The following Saturday, he comes home to find a crowd outside the house. Antanas has drowned.
Jurgis simply leaves. He jumps on a train to the country and becomes a tramp. He occasionally works in the fields and he drinks and parties. Stuck in a thunderstorm one night, he seeks refuge in a farmer’s home. When he sees the farmer’s son, he is struck with grief and runs into the night.
That fall, Jurgis returns to the city with fifteen dollars in his shoe. He is wiser and gets a jobs building tunnels. He is told it is for telephone wires, in reality it is an underground railway to get around the teamster’s union. Jurgis is once again injured on the job and wakes up in a hospital. He has seventy-five cents left and a dollar and a half in wages owed him. Jurgis is reduced to begging and finds that even in that there are those who are better at it than he. While begging one night Jurgis meets Freddie Jones, the son of the owner of a meat plant. Freddie finds Jurgis amusing and takes him home. They drink and eat and after Freddie gives Jurgis a one hundred dollar bill he falls asleep [next page]