In the book The Jungle by Upton Sinclair; this was first published by Fine Creative Media Inc. in 1906 (edition I read was published in 2003) it discuses life as an immigrant and how immigrants foresaw the American dream and how they tired to achieve it. There where many themes for the book. The theme that I took was most important was that life on the other side is not always better then what one has. This theme can be shown many different ways throughout the book. It is shown through the plot and through many examples of event that occurred though the book.
In The Jungle a young man named Jurgis Rudkus moves to the United States landing in Chicago, with his family looking for a better life then what they had in Lithuania. They arrived in Chicago in the middle of where the meat packing industry was located. Landing here was going to provide them with jobs so they could pay rent for a place to stay for the whole family and to purchase food to eat. Once Jurgis gets a job working in the meat packaging plant is when the family realizes that America no better then Lithuania. America had poor people and people are killing each other just to survive. The workers where poorly paid, overworked and had unfair labor practice as well as dangerous working environment. In order for them to get a place to stay all where required to work, this even meant Jurgis father who was sick.
The family is finally able to buy a house. When doing this Elizbieta, Ona's stepmother, feels uneasy almost like they are being taken advantage of. To purchase a house during this time all one needed was $300 down and then $15 a month until the house was paid off. What Elizbieta and the family where not aware of was that the $15 a month didn't i...
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...spected during this time and at times today are still not respected. I feel that we are all human and should all have equal rights. Our working conditions should be to where we can go to work and not worry about coming home because of an unsafe environment and losing our lives. These are things that people, mainly the poor and immigrants, had to deal with on regular bases. They had no body to go to when they had a problem. If they had a problem and went to their boss they had a great potential of being out of a job by the end of the day. As I look at life and our working conditions now compared to back then there are areas where we have greatly improved and then we have areas that we are still working on. They say that history repeats it's self. I am just hoping that we don't repeat this part of history and if we do that it is not repeated to this extent.
In the books, The Jungle by Upton Sinclair and Plunkitt of Tammay Hall, they both focus on how life was like in America during 1905. But they show it in different perspectives. In the book The Jungle, the characters in it are attempting to live the American Dream after migrating from Lithuania to The United States. And in the Plunkitt of Tammay Hall, it is about a sentor named Geroge Washington Plunkitt, who shares his secrets on how to be the best Politican. Throughout both books, they both focus on many of the same issues, yet view them different. The three reoccuring themes I saw in bth books were, government corruption, social class conflicts, and Urbanization. Through out this paper, I will be analyzing the differences between the two books and these three themes.
Upton Sinclair's Purpose in Writing The Jungle Upton Sinclair wrote this book for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, he tries to awaken the reader to the terrible. living conditions of immigrants in the cities around the turn of the century. Chicago has the most potent examples of these. conditions.
The United States of America is known as the land of opportunity and dreams. People dream of migrating to this nation for a chance of a better a life. This belief has been around for many years, ever since the birth of the United States; therefore it’s a factor in which motivate many people migrate to the United States. Upton Sinclair, author of the Jungle, narrates the life of a Lithuanian family and there struggles with work, crime, family loss, and survival in the city of Packingtown. Sinclair expresses her disgust as well as the unbelievable truth of life in the United States involving politics, corruption, and daily struggle that many suffered through in the 19th and 20th century.
In The Jungle, Sinclair deeply understands his subjects and can make the plots real for the reader. Even in a small section of the book, Sinclair makes me feel, imagine and contemplate his words. Chapters 18 through 23, were chapters that Sinclair took time and effort to write and make it to perfection. In my own perspective, I think he achieved this accomplishment and made these chapters a realistic event.
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair, emphasizes the importance in changing to become a thriving society through socialism. Sinclair writes his novel to show the corruption that occurs as a result of capitalism. Jurgis’ family is in search for a better life in America where he believes he will make enough pay to support his family. The novel shows that poverty is in control over the working class, but the working class still has a desperation for money. In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair pushes for Socialism by showing Jurgis’ struggle to find work, the hardships of the packingtown workers, and the inequality of all men in this capitalistic society.
Sinclair, has shown in a dramatic style the hardships and obstacles which Jurgis and fellow workers had to endure. He made the workers sound so helpless and the conditions so gruesome, that the reader almost wants a way out for Jurgis. Sinclair's The Jungle is a "subliminal" form of propaganda for
A major theme of The Jungle is socialism as a remedy for the evils of capitalism. Every event that takes place in the novel is designed to show a particular failure of capitalism. Sinclair attempts to show that capitalism is a "system of chattel slavery" and the working class is subject to "the whim of en every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers"(Sinclair 126). Sinclair portrays this view through Jurgis, a hardworking Lithuanian immigrant and his family. Sinclair uses the hardships faced by this family to demonstrate the effect of capitalism on working people as a whole. Jurgis' philosophy of "I will work harder" is shown not to work in this system. No matter how hard Jurgis worked, he and his family were still stuck in the same squalor. These characters did not overcome the odds and succeed. That would defeat the purpose of the novel; to depict capitalism as an economic and social system that ignores the plight of the working class and only cares for the wealthy, as well as furthering his socialist agenda.
In the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, many immigrants came to the United States to pursue the American Dream. The American Dream is a belief that anyone can have success and prosperity through hard work in a society where upward social mobility is possible. The values and ideals of the American dream consist of democracy, equality, fairness, justice, and liberty. In Upton Sinclair’s novel, The Jungle, he portrays through a Lithuanian immigrant family the hardships immigrants faced while seeking a better life in America. One member of the Lithuanian immigrant family is Jurgis Rudkus, who marries a young woman named Ona Lukoszait. After they get married, Jurgis and Ona move into a home in Chicago with some of Ona’s family members. As the family struggles to pay for the house, they undertake stressful jobs and become workers of cruel and selfish employers. Although employers exploit Jurgis, Jurgis continues to tell Ona that he “will work harder” (Sinclair, 22) to help them achieve the American Dream. Upton Sinclair portrays how capitalism attacks the values of the American Dream through the ugly effects of capitalism, such as exploitation, poor working conditions, dishonesty, manipulation, and corruption.
To be concise, Jurgis and his family faced various challenges in America. As a result, their lives changed, for better or for worse. They were inexperienced, and therefore made many mistakes, which made their life in Chicago very worrisome. However, their ideology and strong belief in determination and hard work kept them alive. In a land swarming with predators, this family of delicate prey found their place and made the best of it, despite the fact that America, a somewhat disarranged and hazardous jungle, was not the wholesome promise-land they had predicted it to be.
“The Jungle” novel was written by an American journalist/ novelist name Upton Sinclair in 1906. “The Jungle” made a big hit and became his best-selling novel because it revealed so well about the economical and social reality during that time. The book mainly described about how unsanitary the meat packing industry was operated in Chicago and the miserable life of the immigrants going along with the industry. Through the story around the life and family of Jurgis Rudjus, a Lithuanian immigrant who comes to America with the belief to change their life and live in a better condition, Sinclair expresses that “The Jungle” is a symbol of capitalism. Sinclair’s contempt for capitalist society is present throughout the novel, demonstrated in the eagerness of Jurgis to work, the constant struggle for survival of the workers in Packing town and the corruption of the man at all levels of the society. Also, the author promotes socialism as a standard political society to replace capitalism.
“The Jungle,” written by Upton Sinclair in 1906, describes how the life and challenges of immigrants in the United States affected their emotional and physical state, as well as relationships with others. The working class was contrasted to wealthy and powerful individuals who controlled numerous industries and activities in the community. The world was always divided into these two categories of people, those controlling the world and holding the majority of the power, and those being subjected to them. Sinclair succeeded to show this social gap by using the example of the meatpacking industry. He explained the terrible and unsafe working conditions workers in the US were subjected to and the increasing rate of corruption, which created the feeling of hopelessness among the working class.
From the very beginning, Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle enthralls the reader with an anticipation that makes one want to continue reading. Upon further research of the author, it is clear he is a passionate writer at heart; though not always successful. The novel is best known for exposing the highly unsanitary conditions of the meat packing industry, run by corrupt political machines, as well as the severity and harshness faced by immigrants during this time. However, Sinclair’s true goal was to promote his new-found socialist principles amidst the growing businesses and harsh labor conditions existing to the lower class.
Rudyard Kipling’s original story of The Jungle Book presented a very distinct group of characters in contrast to virtually all other jungle people in the book. The Bandar-Log were seen as lawless, careless, and mostly mindless individuals who were social outcasts and pariahs. Disney’s film adaptation of Kipling’s tale held this concept, while also giving the monkey people strong characteristic typically connected to African-Americans. This creates a racist undertone in the movie that is absent from the original story’s source.
In the world of economic competition that we live in today, many thrive and many are left to dig through trashcans. It has been a constant struggle throughout the modern history of society. One widely prescribed example of this struggle is Upton Sinclair's groundbreaking novel, The Jungle. The Jungle takes the reader along on a journey with a group of recent Lithuanian immigrants to America. As well as a physical journey, this is a journey into a new world for them. They have come to America, where in the early twentieth century it was said that any man willing to work an honest day would make a living and could support his family. It is an ideal that all Americans are familiar with- one of the foundations that got American society where it is today. However, while telling this story, Upton Sinclair engages the reader in a symbolic and metaphorical war against capitalism. Sinclair's contempt for capitalist society is present throughout the novel, from cover to cover, personified in the eagerness of Jurgis to work, the constant struggle for survival of the workers of Packingtown, the corruption of "the man" at all levels of society, and in many other ways.
Many immigrants came to The United States searching to obtain the American Dream; to be successful and own property they could call home. In the book The Jungle, Sinclair (1990) paints a picture of the many immigrants that came in the early 1900s with their hearts set on working hard and having that pay off only to have the American Dream be just that, a dream. As immigrants arrived in Packingtown, a meatpacking district in Chicago, they were soon met with many struggles and the reality that America was not what they expected; with horrible living condition, unbearable working and sanitation conditions.