Summary Of Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

The Jungle---just the title alone puts a perfect picture of flourishing foliage into the minds of everyone who has heard its name. One would imagine an adventurous tale behind the cover, full of exotic animals, exciting journeys, and perhaps a singing blue bear befriending an ambitious boy named Mowgli. However, the story behind the cover is anything but musical or exciting. To be frank, every line of literature will make you contemplate about becoming a vegetarian, and here’s why. The Jungle, written by American author Upton Sinclair in 1906, shocked its readers worldwide, but mostly in the city of Chicago. The novel focused on exposing the true horrors of the meatpacking industries in the United States, and the mistreatment of the workers, …show more content…
To add on to the dread, everyone who was working in these packing plants would catch the same diseases the cattle had, but still forced to work. The fact that no one knew that this was an issue was what truly disgusted the reader; no one was helping these hard working people, giving them pennies an hour, and having them break their backs in the smoldering heat and bloody stench for hours on end every day. “Let a man so much as scrape his finger pushing a truck in the pickle rooms, and he might have a sore that would put him out of the world; all the joints in his fingers might be eaten by the acid, one by one...you could scarcely find a person who had the use of his thumb; time and time again the base of it had been slashed, till it was a mere lump of flesh against which the man pressed the knife to hold it. The hands of these men would be criss-crossed with cuts, until you could no longer pretend to count or to trace them.” …show more content…
The reader researched more of his works, and soon realized that Upton Sinclair does not have the artistic wit required for making creative titles. For example, his novel Oil! Is a novel about the oil industry. Honestly, it’s quite a laughable title, according to the reader. However, the second possibility makes more sense to the reader. A jungle often includes animals, which this story includes as well, but most would perceive the jungle to be mysterious, fun, and thrilling. Perhaps the story is thrilling, but fun is most certainly an inappropriate adjective to describe this novel with. In this case, the jungle Sinclair is describing is not like any Disney movie or fable; this jungle is harsh, where humans are the true animals, ---where survival is tough, and food is scarce, taken by other ‘animals’. Everyone died by the littlest of afflictions; a prolonging cough, maybe even a small cut on the fingertips could steal a life. In chapter twenty-two, the main character Jurgis is battling with his faltering emotions after his wife dies after childbirth, blowing all of his hard-earned money on alcohol and sex workers in order to numb his pain. Sinclair illustrates how Jurgis’ quality character is crumbling due to drinking and his sexual desires for women he did not