Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • My Term Papers • Get Free Essays • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - Sociology The Jungle The Jungle The beginning of the book starts out at Jurgis and Ona’s wedding, or more specifically, the after party. This scene establishes how these two main characters look, and how they and the rest of the characters act. Jurgis is a big man with thick black hair that goes nearly to his eyes. He is very muscular and well built. Ona is a small woman; her whole body is able to disappear in Jurgis’s arms. She is soft-spoken, little in appearance and in personality. Cousin Marija is a big woman; she is established in the first part of the book as a very pushy and loud person. At the after-ceremony of the weeding, there is much food, drink and fun. It is tradition that the family pays for all this food, drink and fun. The guests (and non-guests for that matter) are indulging themselves and taking advantage of the “free” situation. Tamoszius Kuszleika is the entertainer of the evening: a violinist. He is described as: …an inspired man. Every inch of him is inspired. He stamps with his feet, he tosses his head, he sways and swings to and fro; he has a wizened-up little face, irresistibly comical, and, when he executes a turn or a flourish, his brows knit and his lips work and his eyelids wink and the very ends of his necktie bristle out. (Page 11) This might also describe the scene as very merry, and almost chaotic. The book then goes back in time and describes how Ona, Jurgis, and their families came to live in Packingtown. It is explained that they came from Lithuania with a substantial amount of money. They came to America to seek fortune in the “Land of Opportunity.” Like the tens of thousands of other immigrants, they were fooled. The book takes you through the trials of buying a house, walking to work, finding work, losing money, and being cheated by agents, lawyers, and political bosses. At the beginning, only Jurgis worked, he would not have Ona working. It was not long until it was realized that she would have to work, along with the children and the old and the sick. Everyone would have to work in order to keep alive, in order to feed each other and keep warm in the winter. The difficulty of finding a job in Packingtown was hard enough. The characters also had to walk to work everyday, often in below zero temperatures. The book also describes the process of “speeding up”. Men would have to work at a pace unthinkable to modern society. People were literally worked to death. There were always accidents at work and dying was not unusual. The book also describes the horrible processes of the meat packing industry. Nothing is “clean” about the business. …the beef had lain in vats full of chemicals, and men with great forks speared it out and dumped it into trucks, to be taken to the cooking room. When they had speared out all they could reach, they emptied the vat on the floor, and then with shovels scraped up the balance and dumped it in to the truck. This floor was filthy, yet they set Antanas with his mop slopping the “pickle” into a hold that connected with a sink, where it was caught and used over again forever; and if that were not enough, there was a trap in the pipe, where all the scraps of meet and odds and ends or refuse were caught, and every few days it was the old man’s task to clean these out and shovel their contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meet (Page 65). In one part of the book, a man dies and is mixed in with the other part of the meet that is to be shipped for lard. The conditions in which the people of the book work in are truly unbearable. People wade up their knees in blood, get sores and cuts, and yet they never stop working for fear of loosing their job. Some highlights of the first part of the book might be when Jurgis sprains his ankle and cannot work for many months. When he returns, his job has not been saved and therefore he spends his days looking for new work, unsuccessfully. Also, Ona gives birth to a baby that becomes the love of Jurgis’s life. Old man Antanas dies from the cough along with one of Marija’s crippled babies. The violin player, Tamoszuis and Ona’s stepmother, Teta Elzbieta fall in love, but do not have enough money to get married. In the second part of the book, Jurgis’s life gets turned upside down. After the birth of her first son, Ona gets pregnant again. One night, she becomes very upset, but will not tell Jurgis why. One night she does not come home and Jurgis wants to know why. She breaks into tears and tells Jurgis that a foreman named Connor had forced her into a sexual relationship with him. She begs Jurgis not to do anything about it. Connor is a very powerful man and he could easily ruin the family. Jurgis is too mad to care, he yells at her and runs off to find Connor. Jurgis finds Connor and beats him severely; he is then thrown in jail for thirty days. The judge is not very kind to Jurgis and does not let him off easy. When Jurgis is released, he finds that his family has moved to an even poorer neighborhood, and Ona is in labor at that very moment. Neither the baby, nor Ona, who went into labor very early, survive. Jurgis was not allowed to see her while he was in jail, and he is totally ruined when he comes home and she is half dead. Jurgis realizes that he must pull himself together and he gets a job for the sake of his son. When his son, Antanas, drowns in the mud-filled street, Jurgis gives up on his present life. He leaves Packingtown and his family by climbing aboard a train. He has no idea where he is going. He gets off the train in a pasture. He has nowhere to go and nothing to do. Jurgis enjoys his “hobo” life, doing nothing but wandering across the country. He enjoys never having to do anything and never having to be anywhere. When winter comes, he realizes that he has to return to Chicago in order to survive. Jurgis is out begging on the streets (with a broken arm), when he comes across a young, drunken boy. The boy invites him to his beautiful mansion. The boy is so drunk that he hands Jurgis a hundred dollar bill and then forgets. When Jurgis is thrown into the streets by the butlers, he realizes that he can’t very well pay for anything with a hundred dollar bill, especially the way that he looked. Jurgis goes into a saloon, one that is empty and asks for smaller bills. The bartender agrees to help Jurgis if he will buy a beer. The bartender then gives Jurgis change for a one-dollar bill. He is so mad that he gets into a fight with the bartender and is sent to jail again. In jail, he is re-united with an old friend, Jack Duane, an experienced criminal. After being freed from jail, Jurgis and Duane make a living by robbing people. For the first time in his life, Jurgis has a substantial amount of money. While with Duane, Jurgis learns about the connections between criminals, police, politics, and business. He becomes a member of this complex system and therefore moves into politics. Things in the political world are going great! Jurgis even manages to save 300 dollars. Without knowing it, Jurgis becomes a part of the corrupt system that had once ruined his earlier life. Unfortunately, he runs into Connor again, and nearly kills him a second time. Connor’s political connections cause Jurgis to lose all his profits that he gained while in politics. Jurgis is convinced that his political life is over, due to Connor’s high position of authority. Therefore Jurgis has no choice but to return to his old life: wandering the streets. One very cold night, Jurgis walks into a Socialist meeting to keep warm. He is so amazed by the concepts that are being introduced by the speaker. He feels that his whole life has changed. When the speaker is done speaking Jurgis feels so amazing… …Jurgis was a man whose soul had been murdered, who had ceased to hope and to struggle – who had made terms with degradation and despair; and now, suddenly, in one awful convulsion, the black and hideous fact was made plain to him! There was a falling in of all the pillars of his soul, the sky seemed to split above him – he stood there, with his clenched hands upraised, his eyes bloodshot and the veins standing out purple in his face, roaring in the voice of a wild beast, frantic, incoherent, maniacal. And when he could shout no more he still stood there, gasping and whispering hoarsely to himself: “By God! After the meeting, he is introduced to a man named Ostrinski, who teaches Jurgis about Socialism. Jurgis agrees completely with socialism’s ideals, and becomes a member. Jurgis’s new life passion is socialism: teaching it, learning it, and living by it. As the story ends, the results of an election are being received. The novel ends positively, showing that the Socialist party made great progress in gaining members all across the country. The Jungle is a book that makes American business and politics look very, very bad. It promotes the concept of Socialism, un-covers all of the corruption in our society, and makes the majority workers look like slaves. The book never says anything positive about Capitalism. Jurgis and his family moved from Lithuania to America, expecting a better life. Instead of telling a story about their success through hard work, Upton Sinclair tells a story about how they were cheated before they even got off the boat. The family’s ignorance caused them to be an easy target for many people. For example, the house they bought was a total lie, it was full of hidden expenses and in the end they were not able to keep it. In the book, anyone who earned a living through hard work and honesty would find themselves in poverty. Anyone who lied and cheated was wealthy. This was the way a Capitalistic society was presented in the book. This was shown when Jurgis left Packingtown. He was living selfishly and he was robbing and bribing. It was only during these times that he was successful. The bosses (foremen) were also examples of this. They fired head union members, and if they ever got in trouble for doing this, they would simply give “gifts” to make people keep quiet. The police also lived off of “gifts”. It showed that a hard worker was not rewarded, and was disposed of when he/she became a burden. Toward the end of the book, Upton Sinclair shows the reader how to solve Capitalism’s problems: change it into Socialism. In the book, all the Socialists knew about the “Socialist Revolution”: when the entire planet would become Socialist. Not once does the book mention that Socialism could ever fail. It even claimed that Socialists would control the country by the early nineteen hundreds. All Socialist are described similar by a simply ideology: First, that a Socialist believes in the common ownership and democratic management of the means of producing the necessities of life; and, second, that a socialist believes that the means by which this is to be brought about is the class-conscious political organization of wage-earners (page 330). The Socialists hated the idea of competition. It was competition, and Capitalism that made everything corrupt. Capitalism was the source of all evils, and working right along with it was the Beef Trust. Just about everyone in Packingtown worked for the Beef Trust, and therefore just about everyone in Packingtown was destroyed by it. [The Beef Trust] was a monster devouring with a thousand mouths, trampling with a thousand hoofs; it was the Great Butcher – it was the spirit of Capitalism made flesh… In the national capital it had power to falsify government reports; it violated the rebate laws, and when an investigation was threatened it burned its books and sent its criminal agents After reading The Jungle, a person would never expect the United States to survive as a Capitalist country. The reader is made to believe that the only way for humans to survive is through Socialism. Never once is a positive aspect of Capitalism explored. The only option shown to the reader is Socialism, therefore the book is very one-sided and to an extent, against American society as a whole. Bibliography: Word Count: 2163
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