A Rhetorical Analysis Of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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“Rise up! When you’re living on your knees, you rise up.” In Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton and his fellow colonists “rise up” against the British monarchy’s oppression of the colonies. The lyric very much relates to Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle. The Jungle follows the story of an immigrant family living in Chicago whose lives and human dignities are exploited due to American Capitalism and corruption. Sinclair conveys his attitude toward this through multiple voices, and ultimately, elucidates the need for the working class to “rise up” against corporate America. One of the voices represents America’s corrupt Capitalists and how they dissuade workers from going on strike. Another explicitly tells …show more content…

This evidently goes against Socialist voices who encourage the working class to rebel by going on strike until labor conditions are ameliorated. Sinclair manipulates the rhetorical questions in Scully’s dialogue to convey a patronizing and pitying tone toward naïve workers like Jurgis, as if Scully is a reprimanding parent and Jurgis is an ingenuous child who should have known better. This subsequently conveys a condemnatory and scornful tone toward the Capitalist voices who value profit over reform. Sinclair opposes these Capitalist voices, because they persuade and bribe laborers to continue working rather than granting them the right to separate from an unjust government, as the Declaration of Independence proposes.
The voice that contrasts Scully’s appears in the scene where Jurgis attends his first Socialist event; Sinclair’s use of punctuation and the words “systematic,” “organized,” and “premeditated” in a Socialist speech suggests an outraged and inflammatory attitude toward the treatment of …show more content…

And then will begin the rush that will never be checked, the tide that will never turn till it has reached its flood—that will be irresistible, overwhelming—the rallying of the outraged workingmen of Chicago to our standard! And we shall organize them, we shall drill them, we shall marshal them for the victory! We shall bear down the opposition, we shall sweep it before us—and Chicago will be ours! Chicago will be ours! CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!’ (Sinclair

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