The Jungle2

“The Jungle is perhaps the most brutal novel ever written in America. It is one long scream of pain and tragedy” (Cook 117). The novel shows the reader how hard being an immigrant was in the early 1900s. Immigrants had to take any job they could, even if that meant working in the packing plants, which Upton Sinclair shows in the novel. Jurgis Radix is the main character. Jurgis and his family move to America searching for a better life. Jurgis works in a packing plant and is continuously loosing his job. Halfway through the book, Jurgis’ wife dies trying to give birth. The rest of the novel shows the reader Jurgis’s hardships with his jobs and life. The novel, The Jungle depicts the horrors of meatpacking in the early 1900’s, and helps push the government for stronger sanitation laws.

The conditions in the meatpacking plants were so terrible that several men would died on the job. The things that were in the meat that the public ate were so revolting that Sinclair found it a need to write about it. Sausage meat would be shipped to Europe and be rejected and sent back to the U.S. By the time it reached the U.S., the sausage would be moldy and white, and then it would be “dosed with borax and glycerin, dumped into h

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Meat would also be covered up so that they would pass inspection and be able to be sold in the city. Also, the same with hogs which died of cholera on the trains, and which you might see them being loaded into box cars and hauled away to a place called Globe, in Indiana, where they made a fancy lard. There was over a square mile of space in the yards, and more than half of it was occupied by cattle pens; north and south as far as the eye can reach there stretches a sea of pens. “There were things that went into the sausage in comparison with which a poisoned rat was a tidbit” (Aryes 2).

The Jungle had a wide variety of influences on just about everybody who read the novel. Sinclair told of a young boy in a freezer that had hardly any warm clothes on and his ears where so cold that when they tried to rub them to get warm one of the young boy’s ears fell off. The stockyard brought about ten thousand heads of cattle every day, and as many hogs, and half as many sheep, which meant some eight or ten million live creatures turned into food every year. " American Heritage, December 1987. com/a/acp/netacgi/nph-brs?d=DTCU&s1=Condition.

Approximate Word count = 2298
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page double spaced)

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