Poverty Exposed In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

The Jungle Opinions

Novels have been used frequently by authors for readers to acknowledge certain aspects of society they [readers] are unaware of. A prime example is Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. The novel focuses on Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant, who has just arrived in Chicago with his wife Ona and the rest of her family, including Jurgis’s aging father. Life in America starts at decent for the family with all adults capable of getting jobs, but quickly takes multiple turns for the worst. The family soon faces the corruption in America and the “American Dream” that tears each one of them apart. The Jungle is a fascinating, although gruesome and downright cruel at parts, book that reveals the hardships of poverty and the harsh

In that time immigrants were being exploited for work and other swindles merely because they did not understand English. This happens numerous times with Jurgis and his family with the most impacting one being the contract to the house which they were tricked into agreeing too because of the agent not telling them all the information. The Jungle also tells in shocking detail the lives of impoverished workers and how hard it is to survive when living on less than five dollars a week. It goes into depth of the harsh winters, starvation and the millions of men just wanting to work to see another day. The book doesn’t leave out either the casualties of poverty such as Jurgis’s wife Ona’s death and her baby’s and indirectly Stanislovas’s, one of Elzbieta’s, Ona’s stepmother, children. These were good reasons to write The Jungle, but I think the main reason Sinclair wrote it was to show the corruption in the meat industry. Jurgis gets and loses countless jobs not because he was not a hard worker, but because the companies he worked for were cruel. The companies’ work conditions for the men were horrible and unsafe leading to accidents in the workplace and festering illnesses with one causing the death of Jurgis’s father Dede Antanas. One of Jurgis’s worst

I do not think that anyone truly has a right to disclaim what he wrote considering that those who will probably eat three meals a day with a roof over their head. I find The Jungle to be rational as it does not come right out and state all the horrible things the urban poor face, but instead presents it as cause and effect. An example would be because Jurgis hurt his ankle, he lost his job and the family became low on money. Then he was forced to work at the fertilizer plant and Ona prostituted herself to keep her job which ultimately led to Jurgis going to jail and Ona dying. The events that occur one after another are very realistic during that time and, I consider, what probably happened to many impoverish families living in cities. Sinclair is not trying to manipulate the reader and,yes the horrible events happening to one single family may not be true for everyone one but even if he was exaggerating what harm could be done? It is a fact that living conditions in cities during the early 20th century were bad and unpleasant; cities were covered in sewage, children played in trash for amusement, and people were constantly starving and getting sick with different types of diseases. If Sinclair truly did overemphasize the living conditions of the poor (which in parts I am sure he did to get his point across) what “horrible” things could occur? Give people better places to live that were insulated in the