^^^^^^^^^^
UPTON SINCLAIR:  THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES 

  Can you remember the pressure that built up inside the last
time you had an urge to tell someone off?  If you can, you'll
understand the fury that prompted Upton Sinclair to write The
Jungle in 1905. 

  Sinclair was a cheerful man; yet he loved a fight, especially
whenever he felt wronged or saw others being treated unfairly.
Instead of responding with physical force to injustice, however,
he would reach for his favorite weapon--a pen--and dash off a
book, an article, or a play to expose the wrongdoer.  Or he'd
deliver a speech--or run for public office (in fact, in 1934 he
even came close to winning the governorship of California!). 

  Furious about the amount of control giant industries had over
people's lives at the turn of the century in the United States,
Sinclair believed that the greed of the men who ran them had
turned the American Dream into a nightmare for millions of
workers and consumers.  And so he wrote The Jungle in 1905 to
alert the nation to the misery of American workers, and to
sketch a solution--socialism--to their problems. 

  Sinclair's work over the years (including more than eighty
books and numerous plays, pamphlets, and speeches) was largely a
record of his political passions.  With his writings he hoped,
literally, to change the world.  So, in order to understand The
Jungle, it's helpful to look at the author's life and at the
world he wanted to change in 1905. 

  CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH.  Born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1878,
Sinclair grew up there and in New York City as the only child of
poor but proud parents.  His mother was the daughter of a
well-to-do railroad executive; his father was the son of a U.S.
Navy captain, who fought and died for the South during the Civil
War.  Unfortunately, Upton's father, a liquor salesman, drank
away most of his earnings, and "home" to this sad family was a
succession of boarding-house rooms. 

  Whenever his father failed to pay the rent, a frequent
occurrence, Mrs.  Sinclair would take Upton to her father's
house or to the home of her wealthy sister.  The contrast
between his own family's poverty and his relatives' wealth
bewildered him.  "Mamma, why are some children poor and others
rich?" he remembered asking his mother.  "How can that be fair?"
As Sinclair noted in his autobiography, those questions would
never stop haunting him: 

  Readers of my novels know that I have one favorite theme, the
contrast between the social classes; there are characters from
both worlds, the rich and the poor, and the plots are contrived
to carry you from one to the other.  The explanation is that as
far back as I can remember, my life was a series of Cinderella
transformations; one night I would be sleeping on a
vermin-ridden sofa in a lodging-house, and the next night under
silken coverlets in a fashionable home. 

  Sinclair's childhood experiences made him a lifelong foe of
alcohol, which plays a villain's role in several of his novels,
including The Jungle.  As a teenager he "traced the saloon to
Tammany [the political 'machine' that ran Democratic party
politics in New York] and blamed my troubles on the high
chieftains of this organization....  I had not yet found out
'big business.'" 

  CAPITALISM.  Big Business was the name given to the largely
unregulated corporations that began to dominate the U.S.
economy after the Civil War.  The most harmful ones--those which
Sinclair attacked in The Jungle and in several other books--were
the trusts.  Trusts were corporations or groups of corporations
that were so big, they could monopolize an industry, squeezing
out the free competition that can keep prices down.  Although a
Federal law, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890, banned such
trusts, the government used this weapon sparingly, and some
trusts survived well into the 20th century. 

  The free-booting ways of the trusts were an embarrassment to
backers of capitalism, the economic system based on private
ownership of the enterprises that produce goods and services.
In the 1980s, the U.S.  government plays an active role in the
nation's capitalist economy.  But in the 1800s, the government
kept its distance from business.  The belief then was that the
natural course of supply and demand would regulate the economy
to the best interests of everyone. 

  The trusts made a mockery of that belief by keeping
competition down and prices high in the industries they
dominated.  They did this by gobbling up small companies, some
of which might have found a method to produce and sell a product
at a lower price. 

  The trusts trampled on the public interest in other ways,
too.  Sometimes they corrupted the political process by bribing
crooked politicians.  During Sinclair's youth, voters who
thought elected officials spoke for them were often shocked to
find these officials acting solely in the interests of the "Beef
Trust," or the "Oil Trust," or some other concentrated industry.
As a result, many citizens lost faith in all elected
officials. 

  The trusts had their defenders, however.  One of the most
well-known was John D.  Rockefeller, whose Standard Oil Company
had the petroleum market cornered from 1882 to 1911.  "The
growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest,"
he said.  "The American beauty rose can be produced in the
splendor and fragrance which bring cheer to its beholder only by
sacrificing the early buds which grow up around it.  This is not
an evil tendency in business.  It is merely the working-out of a
law of nature and a law of God." 

  The courts disagreed and in 1892 ordered the breakup of
Rockefeller's trust.  It lived on under the guise of a holding
company until the courts ordered its dismemberment in 1911. 

  SOCIALISM.  Sinclair wouldn't turn his attention to the
trusts until 1902, when he became acquainted with socialist
ideas.  Socialism is a body of ideas that blames many of
society's ills on competition for profit.  Socialists want to
substitute cooperation for competition.  They want the
government to control the enterprises that produce goods and
services and to direct these enterprises toward socially
responsible, not just profitable projects. 

  As the final chapter of The Jungle demonstrates, socialists
don't always agree on goals or methods.  Some of them want total
government control of the economy, some only partial control.
Others, including communists, believe that it's necessary to use
violence to replace a capitalist system with a socialist one. 

  Sinclair didn't believe in violent methods or in the need for
government to take over an entire economy.  From 1902 until his
death in 1968, he was a democratic socialist.  He believed that
voters who were educated about the evils of a capitalist system
could use the ballot--not the bullet--to take control of the
economy through their elected government.  The extent of this
control would depend on what the voters decided was necessary.
Educating the voters was Sinclair's major purpose in writing The
Jungle. 

  EARLY ADULTHOOD.  At age twenty-four, when Sinclair first
began reading socialist theory, he was ready for its message.
Financially and professionally, he was down and out.  He had
financed three years of graduate study at Columbia University by
churning out cheap adventure novels.  Then he had spent two
frustrating years writing serious novels, but his serious books
had been washouts.  He was unable to earn enough money to
support his wife and their baby son, and this failure depressed
him. 

  Still, he tried his hand at another novel, Manassas, about
the Civil War, while living on thirty dollars a month provided
by a wealthy socialist.  The book was published in 1904 and
earned Sinclair five hundred dollars.  His total earnings from
four novels in four and a half years came to less than a
thousand dollars. 

  Fortunately, Sinclair didn't have to give up writing.  The
editor of a socialist magazine, the Appeal to Reason, offered
him $500 for the right to serialize a novel about "wage slaves"
(industrial workers).  Sinclair snapped up the offer.  Leaving
his wife and son in Princeton, New Jersey, he took a train to
Chicago, which was the world center of the meat-packing
industry.  He lived among stockyard workers for seven weeks,
collecting information for his novel. 

  What he saw appalled him.  There was nothing "enlightened"
about the way industrialists of the day viewed their employees.
Profits came first; the workers' well-being, second.  In the
absence of strong unions, workers were treated brutally and paid
wages much too low for a family to live on. 

  But the workers dared not complain.  Outside the packing
plants, newly arrived immigrants--men and women desperate for
jobs--offered to work for even lower wages. 

  Data gathered by the historian Oscar Handlin show just how
desperate they were.  For every dollar a native-born American
earned in 1900, Italian immigrants earned 84 cents, Hungarian
immigrants 68 cents, and other European immigrants 54 cents. 

  Sick pay and unemployment benefits, standard in the 1980s,
didn't exist for the average worker in 1904.  When the
bread-winner lost his job or was too sick to work, his family
often went hungry. 

  At the time, there were few laws governing healthy living and
working conditions.  The packing plants were dangerous
places--sites of accidents and sources of all kinds of diseases,
from pneumonia and blood poisoning to deadly tuberculosis.  The
hovels where stockyard workers lived were overcrowded firetraps.
The unpaved streets in the slums became open sewers when rains
flooded the cesspools behind the houses. 

  Sinclair also noted how little the government did to protect
consumers against fraud.  Sawdust and rat droppings were mixed
into the sausage meat and deviled ham.  Spoiled meat regularly
found its way into cans.  One U.S.  Army general estimated that
spoiled meat, first treated with dangerous chemicals and then
canned, had killed three thousand U.S.  soldiers during the
Spanish-American War in 1898. 

  To survive, workers in the meat-packing plants were forced to
take part in this horrendous fraud--one that affected nearly
every American.  Moreover the poor and uneducated workers were
frequently swindled into buying furniture, houses, insurance,
and other things they couldn't afford, usually signing contracts
they couldn't understand. 

  SINCLAIR'S RESEARCH.  Sinclair was a good reporter.  He
checked and double-checked his facts.  He talked with settlement
house workers--men and women who had opted to live among
Chicago's poor immigrants and help them "settle" in America. 

  Once he had the facts, he had to dream up people to "hang"
them on.  He tells in his autobiography how he put together his
story: 

  Wandering about "back of the yards" one Sunday afternoon I
saw a wedding party going into the rear room of a saloon....
[Sunday was the only day the workers had free.] I slipped into
the room and stood against the wall.  There, the opening chapter
of The Jungle began to take form.  There were my characters--the
bride, the groom, the old mother and father, the boisterous
cousin, the children, the three musicians, everybody.  I...
began to write the scene in my mind, going over it and, as was
my custom, fixing it fast.  I...  stayed until late at night,...
not talking to anyone, just watching, imagining, and engraving
the details on my mind. 

  It was two months before I...  first put pen to paper; but
the story stayed, and I wrote down whole paragraphs, whole
pages, exactly as I had memorized them. 

  Back in Princeton, the Sinclairs borrowed some money and
moved out of their one-room cabin into a farmhouse.  Behind the
house, Sinclair set up a rickety cabin, 8 feet wide and 10 feet
long.  He equipped it with a potbelly stove, a chair, and a
table, and began writing The Jungle on Christmas Day, 1904. 

  His experiences in Chicago had shocked him.  Nonetheless, the
book's emotional energy, from the first page to the last, comes
primarily from Sinclair and his family's own suffering. 

  The Appeal to Reason began serializing The Jungle even before
it was finished.  The weekly, published in Kansas, had about
500,000 subscribers, mostly farmers in the Midwest and West.
Readers began to write to Sinclair, and he saw he had a success
on his hands. 

  Nonetheless, a number of book publishers refused to handle
The Jungle.  One wanted Sinclair to cut out some of the graphic
descriptions of packing-plant operations.  Others, no doubt,
wanted nothing to do with a book that aimed to convert the
nation to socialism.  Finally, one publisher sent a lawyer to
Chicago to check out Sinclair's facts.  The lawyer's report
backed Sinclair, and the firm brought out the book in January
1906. 

  MUCKRAKERS.  The Jungle caused a furor.  The book's
revelations became front-page news.  Sinclair's shocking picture
of packing-plant conditions made a nation of meat-eaters groan
with pain and anger.  President Theodore Roosevelt sent a
commission to Chicago to investigate the charges of this new
"muckraker." 

  Muckraker was Roosevelt's word for writers like Sinclair, who
exposed business abuses and political corruption.  Roosevelt
read their work and even consulted with them.  (It was at a
White House lunch with Sinclair that Roosevelt decided to send
his own investigators to Chicago.) But he claimed not to care
much for them, possibly because they attacked many of the
politicians and business leaders he had to work with as
president. 

  Historians point out that muckrakers served a useful purpose.
Most of them wrote for large-circulation magazines that had the
money to support thorough investigations.  Their reports helped
drum up public support for government regulation of the trusts
and for electoral reforms that made politics in the U.S.  more
democratic. 

  Sinclair's muckraking in The Jungle helped clean up the
meat-packing industry.  Roosevelt's commission upheld all of
Sinclair's charges, except one about men falling into vats and
being turned into lard.  (Sinclair's informants in Chicago
insisted this had happened--not once, but several times.) As a
result, the president put the power of his office behind two
bills designed to reform the industry. 

  The Pure Food and Drug Act banned the selling of dangerous or
fake drugs and impure food.  The Meat Inspection Act required
federal officials to inspect meat slaughtered in one state and
sold in another.  Both became law in June 1906, less than six
months after The Jungle appeared in book form. 

  Sinclair's work had had a major effect--but not the one he
had hoped it would.  He felt that the uproar over spoiled and
adulterated meat had caused his readers to miss his larger
message, and he spelled out his disappointment in a magazine
article that appeared in October 1906: 

  I wished to frighten the country by a picture of what its
industrial masters were doing to their victims; entirely by
chance I had stumbled on another discovery--what they were doing
to the meat-supply of the civilized world.  In other words, I
aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the
stomach. 

  The message of The Jungle was not lost on fellow socialists,
however.  Jack London, a prominent socialist and best-selling
author, touted the novel in the pages of the Age of Reason: 

  Here it is at last!  The book we have been waiting for these
many years!  The Uncle Tom's Cabin of wage slavery!  Comrade
Sinclair's book, The Jungle!  And what Uncle Tom's Cabin did for
black slaves, The Jungle has a large chance to do for the
wage-slaves of today. 

  Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel,
troubled the nation's conscience with a painful portrait of the
evils of slavery.  It was one of the many wedges that drove
Northerners and Southerners apart and brought on the war that
put an end to slavery in America. 

  The Jungle failed to arouse a similar response for the
"working men of America," to whom it is dedicated.  Most
Americans in 1906 seemed to accept Rockefeller's claim that the
worker's sacrifice was part of God's design.  Government
programs designed to protect workers on the job and during
periods of unemployment wouldn't arrive until the bleak days of
the Great Depression in the 1930s. 

  Yet the novel's failure to extend democracy to the workplace
is no reflection on Sinclair's abilities as a reporter.  The
Jungle is a heartbreaking story of an immigrant family's
struggle to survive, and for that alone it is well worth
reading.  But it is also a sound historical document of the life
and sufferings of factory workers during the early years of this
century. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  THE PLOT 

  The wedding feast of Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite,
immigrants from Lithuania, begins exuberantly and ends in
disappointment in the back room of a Chicago saloon.  Most of
the guests are drunk and exhausted.  The thought of having to
return to work in the stockyards in a few short hours further
depresses them. 

  For the newlyweds' relatives--especially Marija Berczynskas,
Ona's cousin and the organizer of the festivities--there is
further reason for despair.  In the old country, the guests
chipped in to pay for the wedding party and to leave the
newlyweds a little extra money with which to start their married
life.  Yet here in Packingtown, the stockyard district of
Chicago, the old communal traditions are dying out among the
immigrant workers.  So many freeloaders have come to the party
that Jurgis and Ona must begin their married life in debt. 

  Still, Jurgis faces the future bravely.  "Leave it to me," he
tells Ona.  "I will earn more money--I will work harder." 

  Jurgis first saw Ona a year and a half earlier, at a fair in
Lithuania, where he had gone to sell two of his father's horses.
She was fourteen, and he was about twenty five.  It was love at
first sight for Jurgis, but Ona's father, "a rich man," would
not let Jurgis have her.  The next time he saw her, her father
had died, the farm had been sold, and the family was adrift.
Still, Ona's attachment to her stepmother, Elzbieta, kept her
from marrying Jurgis. 

  Jonas, Elzbieta's brother, suggested that they might have a
better future in America, where a friend had become rich in a
city named Chicago.  They set out--six adults (including
Jurgis's father, Dede Antanas) and Elzbieta's six children--in
early summer. 

  Once in Chicago, the first order of business was to find
shelter and work.  Jonas's friend, Kokubas Szedvilas, a poor
delicatessen owner, acted as their guide.  He sent them to a
filthy lodging house, where they determined to stay only until
they got work. 

  Jurgis found work as a sweeper on the killing beds at
Brown's, a meat-packing company.  Marija found work as a can
painter, and Jonas got a job pushing a truck at Durham's,
Brown's rival.  Though at first Dede Antanas couldn't find work,
they decided they could afford to buy a "new" house, using some
of their savings as a down payment.  Finally, Dede Antanas got a
job in the damp "pickle room" at Durham's by promising to kick
back a third of his salary to the man who hired him. 

  That experience and others began to shake Jurgis's faith in
America.  Both Jonas and Marija had gotten their jobs through
the misfortunes of others.  In his job Antanas had to shovel the
residue of chemically treated meat onto a truck headed for the
cannery.  Jurgis saw pregnant cows butchered and their unborn
calves illegally mixed with other carcasses.  He even helped
butcher cattle that had died before reaching the
slaughterhouse. 

  His faith was further shaken when he heard their house was
not in fact new.  The previous four families had lost the house
when they couldn't keep up monthly payments.  Jurgis also finds
out there were hidden charges to be paid each month--for
interest, taxes, and so on. 

  Ona got a job sewing covers on hams, and 14-year-old
Stanislovas convinced a priest to certify he was sixteen--old
enough to hold a job.  Stanislovas then joined the army of child
workers by getting a job at Durham's placing empty cans under
jets of lard, 10 hours a day, six days a week, for five cents an
hour.  Working this way, the family was able to save enough
money for the November wedding of Ona and Jurgis. 

  All are back at work the morning after the wedding--mostly
dead on their feet from exhaustion.  Jurgis and Ona's married
life is cheerless.  The pressures of work, poverty, and illness
stifle their spirits.  Jurgis's father, Antanas, sickens and
dies, and Jurgis, learning fast, negotiates a funeral that won't
bankrupt the family. 

  Winter comes, an agony for Packingtown.  Homeless men who had
spent the warmer months in the country, working on farms, clamor
at the gates of the packing houses, looking for work.  Inside
the plants, there is no heat, except in the cooking rooms.  At
lunch break, the men race to "Whiskey Row," where, for the price
of a drink or two, they can keep warm and get a "free" lunch.
Jurgis takes only one drink, for he has Ona to think about.  The
house is cold, and many nights they sleep with their clothes
on. 

  Marija and Tamoszius Kuszleika fall in love, but the canning
factory where Marija works shuts down, and they must postpone
their wedding.  A general business slowdown means that Jurgis
gets only about a half day's paid work, though he must spend all
day on the killing floor. 

  Angry, Jurgis joins the union and has the other working
members of his family join as well.  He begins to learn English.
He also acquires a cynical opinion of democracy.  A Democratic
party member helps him become a citizen and vote for the
candidates of the local Democratic boss, Mike Scully.  In
exchange for his vote, Jurgis gets two dollars and two hours off
work, with pay. 

  He begins to see how the packers operate.  They sell spoiled
or adulterated meat without qualms.  Their workers are exposed
to awful occupational diseases, yet the packers take no steps to
protect the employees.  They steal water from the city and
pollute the Chicago River--and the city government looks the
other way. 

  Jurgis's family struggles through their second winter in
America.  Spring comes, with its flooding rains, and then
summer, with its stifling heat.  Marija's factory reopens, but
she loses her job anyway and becomes a meat trimmer at half her
first wage.  Ona has a baby boy and harms her health by
returning to work prematurely. 

  Their third winter, Jurgis injures himself on the job and is
out of work for three months.  When spring arrives, Jonas simply
disappears, reducing the family's income by a third.  Two of
Elzbieta's boys leave school to sell newspapers.  When Jurgis
feels fit to work, he finds his old job gone.  Finally, he takes
a Job at Durham's fertilizer plant.  Elzbieta goes to work, and
the boys go to school again.  Jurgis, a pariah because of the
smell of fertilizer he carries with him, starts to drink.  Ona
is pregnant again and prey to fits of weeping.  Jurgis discovers
that she has been sleeping with Phil Connor, one of the bosses,
who threatened to have everyone in her family fired if she
didn't submit to him.  Jurgis nearly kills Connor and is sent to
jail.  Stanislovas visits him and reports that Ona is sick,
Marija injured, and the family almost starving.  Their only
income is from what the children can earn selling newspapers. 

  After his release from jail, Jurgis discovers that the family
has been evicted from the house they had struggled so hard to
keep.  They are back in the lodging house where they first lived
when they came to the city.  Jurgis finds Ona in labor and
persuades a midwife to help, to no avail.  Ona and the baby
die. 

  Because of his little son Antanas, Jurgis stays and gets a
job with a maker of farm equipment.  After nine days, his
department closes, and Jurgis is laid off.  He gets another job
at a steel plant.  When his son accidentally drowns, Jurgis
turns his back on Chicago and becomes a hobo.  In the fall he
returns to the city and gets a job digging a tunnel.  An
on-the-job injury puts him in the hospital.  After he gets out,
he joins the army of unemployed men hunting for work during a
recession in January 1904. 

  He starts begging and meets the drunken scion of a
meat-packing family.  Jurgis goes home with him and leaves with
a full stomach and a hundred-dollar bill.  When a bartender
cheats him out of the money Jurgis attacks him, is arrested and
jailed. 

  Released again, he returns to crime, tutored by a former
cellmate named Jack Duane.  Jurgis learns how Chicago's criminal
underworld helps to corrupt the city's government.  Through Buck
Halloran, a district leader, he learns how graft works, and he
learns about "pull." 

  Jurgis returns to the stockyards as an undercover operative
of the Democratic boss.  He promotes the boss's choice for
alderman--the Republican candidate.  Jurgis's man wins, and
Jurgis stays on in the stockyards.  In June, the butcher's union
strikes.  Jurgis gets a foreman's job, takes bribes from his
men, and beats up strikers for the packers.  A second attack on
Phil Connor lands him in jail again.  Jurgis posts bail and
flees. 

  He goes back to begging.  He meets an old friend who gives
him Marija's address.  When he tracks her down, he discovers she
is a prostitute and a drug addict.  Stanislovas is dead, she
explains--eaten by rats.  The others are alive, living mainly on
Marija's earnings. 

  That night he walks into a political rally to keep warm.  An
emotional orator converts him to socialism, and his life takes a
new turn.  He is given a job as porter in a hotel owned by a
socialist.  He lives with Elzbieta and her children, but cannot
convince Marija to change her life.  Jurgis throws himself into
socialism.  The novel ends on election night in 1904.  At a
Socialist party gathering, Jurgis learns that his party has made
a strong showing.  A speaker exhorts the crowd to organize the
workers so that "Chicago will be ours!" 

  Sinclair populates The Jungle with characters from nearly
every walk of life and social class.  He gives 60 of them names.
Dozens of others go nameless, although their actions help shape
the destinies of the major characters.  Together, the men,
women, and children in The Jungle suggest the vibrant and varied
life of America during the early years of the 20th century. 

  The suggestion is intentional on Sinclair's part, since his
goal is to expose an entire social system--the ruthlessly
competitive capitalist democracy that is the chief villain of
his story.  He seeks to prove that all who come into contact
with the system are brutalized and corrupted by it. 

  A brief analysis of some of the important characters follows.
The characters are listed in the order of their appearance. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  MARIJA BERCZYNSKAS 

  Marija, Ona's cousin, is one of the most striking characters
in the novel.  She is the one we'd bet on if asked to predict
which member of the family had the best chance of surviving.
When we meet her on the first page, she is in charge of the
wedding feast, seeing that "the best home traditions" are
respected.  Later we learn that she has a "face full of
boundless good nature and the muscles of a dray
horse"--characteristics that helped her get her first job in
America, painting cans. 

  Yet she has a softness about her, as well.  Tamoszius
discovers this and falls in love with her. 

  By the end of the novel, however, she is a whore and dope
addict, burned-out at the age of 24 or 25.  Her remarkable
health has disappeared with the Old World values that served her
so poorly.  She now takes "the business point of view";
prostitution is simply a way of making a living in the new
world--of surviving.  "When people are starving," she says, "and
they have anything with a price, they ought to sell it, I
say." 

  What has happened to bring down this female counterpart of
Jurgis?  She has had a lot of discouragement:  job injuries,
layoffs, her family's dissolution.  The final blow must have
been Tamoszius's disappearance after he lost a finger and could
no longer play the violin.  We see her in the final chapter,
having given herself up to her fate.  "I'll stay here till I
die, I guess.  It's all I'm fit for." 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  ONA LUKOSZAITE 

  Ona is her husband's opposite, and Sinclair introduces her as
such.  She is "blue-eyed and fair, while Jurgis had great black
eyes with beetling brows." She has some education:  he has none.
She is tiny "small for her age, a mere child"; Jurgis is huge,
with "mighty shoulders" and "giant hands." Clearly, she's going
to need protection in the predatory environment of Chicago.  The
question from the start is whether Jurgis can provide it.  In
the end, he cannot.  She dies in childbirth at the age of 18,
four years after they'd met and two years after they'd married,
having lived less than three years in America. 

  The years between are brutal and take their toll on her body
and mind.  Too timid to assert herself, she is cheated out of a
trolley transfer and must walk through rain to her job sewing
covers on hams.  After childbirth, she returns to work too early
and suffers "womb trouble." Her coughing suggests she may have
tuberculosis.  She suffers "fearful nervousness" and "fits of
aimless weeping"--all attributable, we later learn, to her
secret life as mistress of a boss who is forcing her to submit
to him.  "He would have ruined us," she told Jurgis.  "I only
did it--to save us." 

  Was hers a heroic act, as some readers suggest?  Or is she
simply a passive victim--an easy prey for all the forces arrayed
against immigrant workers in industrial America?  The correct
answer probably lies somewhere in between.  Unable to afford
proper medical help, she dies in agony trying to bear a
stillborn child. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  JURGIS RUDKUS 

  A young Lithuanian immigrant, Jurgis is the book's central
character.  He is a naif--a familiar figure in literature--who
gains wisdom after a series of batterings push him into the pit
of despair.  His discovery of socialism points the way out, and
at the end of the novel he becomes a convert, happily immersed
in a movement that promises to bring economic democracy to
America. 

  Jurgis is the only character whose interior life is explored.
Yet Sinclair's handling of his emotions, moods, and thoughts
doesn't add much to our knowledge of him.  Like the other
characters, he is revealed most vividly through his actions and
losses. 

  Jurgis's primary goal is to protect Ona, and when he reaches
America, he has every confidence he can do so.  He is strong,
young, and eager to work, and a true believer in "rugged
individualism"--self-reliance.  But the forces of greed
overpower him.  A real estate agent cons the family into buying
a house they can't afford.  Then after a job injury lays him up
for three months, he loses his job and must accept one in a
fertilizer plant.  In the end, he can't protect Ona.  She is
forced into prostitution and dies trying to give birth to a
second child.  Economic forces, due to a slack in demand, cost
him a job at a farm equipment plant.  After his son drowns, he
quits another job at a steel plant and spends a summer on the
road, experimenting with freedom from responsibility.  Back in
Chicago, he gets a job digging a tunnel.  An injury lands him in
the hospital. 

  After these events, he sinks into a life of crime as a foe of
society.  He becomes a mugger and a grafter.  He dupes fellow
workers as an undercover operative for the Democratic machine.
He helps break up a strike, then ends up in jail a third time.
Once more he becomes a homeless man, a beggar.  So much for
rugged individualism! 

  It is by chance that he is saved.  He walks into a Socialist
rally for warmth and becomes swept up in the movement.  Here, at
last, is an explanation for his woes and a road map to utopia.
Socialism revives his dignity, strength, and self-confidence
because he is now a member of something larger than himself, not
merely an individual.  In the last scene, he vanishes into an
audience of two thousand Socialists who are attending an
election-night rally. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  TETA ELZBIETA LUKOSZAITE 

  Ona's beloved stepmother, and herself the mother of six
children, Elzbieta remains a link between the Old World and the
New throughout the novel.  She insists on a traditional wedding
for Ona and a proper funeral for her son Kristoforas, when he
dies.  She begs money for a requiem mass when Ona dies and
persuades Jurgis to stay on for his son's sake.  She is ready,
predictable, even stoic.  She is "one of the primitive
creatures:  like the angleworm, which goes on living though cut
in half....  She did this because it was her nature--she asked
no questions about the justice of it, nor the worthwhileness of
life in which destruction and death ran riot." 

  Although we know all these things about her, we don't really
get to know her.  At the end, though sick and being supported
largely by Marija's prostitution, she attends Socialist meetings
with Jurgis; yet they mean nothing to her--she plans her meals
during the speeches. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  KOTRINA LUKOSZAITE 

  Kotrina, Elzbieta's daughter, suffers the fate of many
working-class females when she has to shoulder the burden of
keeping house at age 13.  She is "prematurely made old,"
Sinclair tells us.  Like her brothers, she eventually goes out
to sell newspapers and becomes the most successful of them
all. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  GRANDMOTHER MAJAUSKIENE 

  This wise old woman, the first Socialist we meet, seems to
enjoy being the bearer of bad news.  It is she who tells the
family that the real estate agent swindled them.  Sinclair
describes her as a witch--"unrelenting, typifying fate." Like
Shakespeare's witches, she foreshadows the future.  The family's
house, she says, is "unlucky." 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  TAMOSZIUS KUSLEIKA 

  Tamoszius is a slaughterhouse worker and also a self-taught
musician, whose energy inspires the gaiety of the wedding feast,
despite his lack of talent.  His love for Marija (his opposite
in size and manner) is doomed; the two can never get enough
money together to marry.  After he loses a finger on the job and
can no longer play the violin, he disappears.  He is a comic
figure and, ultimately, a tragic one.  A Socialist, he is proof
that the creed is not every convert's salvation. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  DEDE ANTANAS RUDKUS 

  Jurgis's father is a touching figure, who thinks he is dying
when we first meet him at the wedding feast.  He is sixty years
old but looks eighty.  His gloomy speech, delivered amid
consumptive coughs, throws the mood of the feast off-kilter. 

  While working in the pickle (chemical) room at Durham's, the
old man contracts tuberculosis and sores that never heal on his
feet.  But, a proud man, he continues working almost until his
death. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  JOKUBAS SZEDVILAS 

  Jokubas is the friend of Jonas whose mythical success in
America lures the families of Jurgis and Ona to Chicago.
Actually, he is a delicatessen owner who has had to mortgage his
store to pay back rent.  He finds the newcomers a place to stay
and takes them on a tour of the packing plants.  His sarcastic
comments annoy Jurgis, as does his advice not to buy a house.
In both cases, he is proven right. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  ANIELE JUKNEIENE 

  A "little woman, with a wrinkled face," Aniele is the
rheumatic widow whose "unthinkably filthy" lodging house becomes
the newcomers' first home in Chicago.  She supports her three
children by raising chickens and taking in wash and lodgers.
After Ona and her family are evicted from their house, she rents
her garret to them.  There, Ona dies and, later, little Antanas
drowns outside the house. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  JONAS 

  Elzbieta's brother is the one who suggests the family
emigrate to America, where "a friend of his had gotten rich." In
Chicago, he gets work pushing a hand truck and likes "to smoke
his pipe in peace before...  bed." One Saturday night he picks
up his pay and disappears.  Though the family's income is
reduced by a third, no one blames him.  "He paid good board, and
was yet obliged to live in a family where nobody had enough to
eat." 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  STANISLOVAS LUKOSZAITE 

  Stanislovas, one of Elzbieta's children, is the center of
Sinclair's expose of child labor; he goes to work at a lard
machine at age fourteen.  His shock at seeing a young worker
lose his ears from frostbite gives him a pathological fear of
cold.  To get him to work on cold days, Jurgis must beat him.
Eventually, Stanislovas loses his job and goes into the streets
to sell newspapers.  He falls asleep in an old oil factory after
drinking too much beer, and rats eat him alive. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  BUSH HARPER 

  Harper, one of Scully's henchmen, is the night watchman who
helps Jurgis become naturalized, so that he can vote the
Democratic ticket.  Later he gets Jurgis a job at Durham's as an
undercover political worker for Mike Scully, the Democratic
boss. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  MIKE SCULLY 

  Scully is the corrupt political boss of the stockyards
district.  A puppet of the packers, he nevertheless has a lot of
power.  Through a number of crooked schemes, he obtains enough
money to bribe officials and pay for votes. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  MISS HENDERSON 

  Ona gets her job sewing covers on hams by paying a bribe to
her forelady, Miss Henderson.  Henderson lives in a brothel with
Phil Connor.  She sets up Ona for Connor's sexual pleasure. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  LITTLE ANTANAS RUDKUS 

  Jurgis's child makes a family man out of Jurgis, and it's for
his sake that Jurgis goes to work after Ona dies.  His drowning
in the flooded street outside the widow's lodging house drives
Jurgis away to follow his whims for the summer. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  VILIMAS AND NIKALOJUS LUKOSZAITE 

  Two of Elzbieta's sons, Vilimas, age 11, and Nikalojus, age
10, are pulled out of school and sent into the streets to sell
newspapers.  They become streetwise, adapting too well to their
new environment to suit their elders, learning to sneak free
rides on trolleys and to identify the city's criminals by
name. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  KRISTOFORAS LUKOSZAITE 

  At the age of three, Elzbieta's crippled child Kristoforas
dies of convulsions, possibly from eating spoiled sausage.  His
loss devastates his mother, who begs the money for a proper
funeral. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  PAT CALLAHAN 

  The owner of saloons and brothels, this city judge does the
packers' bidding whenever he's asked.  He ignores Jurgis's
honest defense of his attack on Connor and sentences Jurgis to
jail. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  MADAME HAUPT 

  One of Sinclair's most convincing characters, this midwife is
a grotesque--a repugnant clown figure that invites the reader's
nervous laughter.  Fat, greasy, vain, and greedy, she
nonetheless goes to Ona's aid because she can't stand to see
people suffer.  Sinclair uses her to make a point about medical
care for the poor. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  JUOZAPAS LUKOSZAITE 

  Another of Elzbieta's crippled children, Juozapas pokes his
crutch into the garbage dump looking for edible food.  A social
worker discovers him and sets up a job for Jurgis at a steel
plant. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  FREDDIE JONES 

  Son of the wealthy meat packer, Old Man Jones, young Freddie
is out on the town when he finds Jurgis begging.  Sinclair uses
him to show the insensitivity of the rich to the plight of the
poor.  Freddie can't make the imaginative leap required to
understand Jurgis's poverty.  He figures they're both in the
same boat:  "No money, either," Freddie tells Jurgis.  His
father has left him "with less than two thousand dollars in his
pocket," more than an unskilled worker in Packingtown can make
in five years. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  BUCK HALLORAN 

  One of Scully's men, Halloran introduces Jurgis to some of
the intricacies of political corruption.  He pays Jurgis $5 to
pick up paychecks for imaginary city workers.  He's another
example of the people who bleed city governments and corrupt the
political process. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  COMRADE OSTRINSKI 

  A Polish immigrant, this struggling pants-finisher lives with
his wife in a dingy flat.  He takes Jurgis home and gives him a
crash course in Socialist theory. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  TOMMY HINDS 

  Hinds, a veteran of the Civil War and a Socialist, hires
Jurgis to be the porter in his hotel--a "hot-bed of...
propaganda." There, Jurgis continues his Socialist education.
Whatever the complaint, Hinds has the cure:  "Vote the Socialist
ticket!" 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  SETTING 

  Most of the action in The Jungle takes place from November
1900 to November 1904 in Chicago, Illinois, then "the meat
capital of the world." In flashbacks (chapters 2 through 6)
Sinclair takes the reader back to the spring of 1899 and rural
Lithuania, then part of Tsarist Russia.  (Today Lithuania is one
of the republics that make up the Soviet Union.) This device
allows Sinclair to fill in background details about Jurgis, Ona,
and their families.  More important, it allows him to contrast
peasant life in the Old World with the jarring brutality of life
for industrial workers in America. 

  But Chicago is the main setting--and a brilliant choice it
was.  As the 20th century opened, Chicago produced more factory
goods than any other city in the world except New York.  Best of
all, for Sinclair's purposes, it had the meat-packing industry,
a ready-made metaphor for everything that Sinclair believed ugly
and life-denying about a capitalist economy. 

  About 8.8 million immigrants entered the U.S.  between 1901
and 1910.  Most were lured to the big cities, where--if they
were lucky--they got backbreaking jobs as unskilled laborers in
factories and mills.  To Sinclair, their fate was no different
from that of the hogs and cattle brought to Chicago by train
from all over the Midwest and West.  The immigrants were being
led to slaughter, too.  Work in the meat-packing industry was
notoriously hazardous. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  THEMES 

  In 1905 Sinclair had two goals in writing The Jungle.  He
wanted to expose the evils of capitalism--especially the way it
exploited wage earners.  And he wanted to convince his readers
to consider socialism as an alternative to capitalism.  Thus,
the novel has two major themes: 

  1.  Greed and ruthless competition have made
turn-of-the-century America into a brutal jungle.  "Take or be
taken" is the guiding rule, and everyone is someone else's prey.
"All the fair and noble impulses of humanity, the dreams of
poets and the agonies of martyrs, are shackled and bound in the
service of organized and predatory Greed." 

  2.  The solution is to substitute cooperation for competition
by reorganizing the economy along Socialist lines--that is, by
giving ownership of essential industries to the public and
running them democratically for everyone's benefit. 

  Linked to these major themes are a number of minor themes: 

  1.  Those at the bottom of the economic ladder--wage-earners
and their families--are at a particular disadvantage in the
capitalist jungle.  They are slaves to the whims of their
masters--the capitalists who own and run private industry.
Immigrants, ignorant of the language and ways of their new
country, are the most vulnerable members of this class. 

  2.  Industrial capitalism is an efficient, impersonal
"slaughtering machine" that sacrifices its workers.  Businesses
take no responsibility for their workers.  They "use up" the
strong and young and discard the weak and old. 

  3.  Democracy under capitalism is a sham, because big
business, not the ordinary citizen, controls the government.
Business and government work hand-in-hand to corrupt the
democratic process.  Elective politics is a shell game that the
worker usually loses. 

  4.  Unions are no match for capitalist organizations, whose
superior resources make them quicker, stronger, and more
flexible.  "The whole machinery of society is at their
aggressors' command." 

  5.  Because they are often ignorant of their own best
interests, workers unknowingly take steps to defeat them.  They
back the wrong candidates, manufacture goods that might harm
them, and break strikes that could benefit them. 

  6.  Wage earners must be taught to see themselves for what
they are:  an oppressed class.  Only then can they be expected
to act in their own interests and to elect leaders who will
support a Socialist revolution. 

  7.  Marriage is a trap, because the need to support a family
makes wage-earners vulnerable to exploitation, on the job and
off. 

  8.  The consumer's welfare, like the workers, is of secondary
importance to the capitalist, who puts profits first. 

  Many readers have remarked on Sinclair's kinship with the
Naturalist school of literature founded by the noted French
author Emile Zola (1840-1902).  Sinclair's characters, for
example, are creatures of circumstance--of the accidents of
their pasts (through heredity and culture) and their present
environments.  It is useful in a discussion of the novel's
themes to examine the Naturalists' theories.  As you read The
Jungle, you can decide how close a kin Zola is to Sinclair. 

  Zola developed Naturalism as a way of justifying the realist
approach in literature.  Realists describe things as they are,
without dressing up what they find important in everyday life. 

  Zola believed that, in literature, realism was the only
honest approach.  He also believed that in the hands of a
careful realist the novel could be a kind of scientific
experiment.  So notebook in hand, Zola studied the world of his
characters--usually Parisian slum dwellers.  He recorded the
details of that world in his novels to show how his characters'
environments shaped their lives.  Moreover, he was careful to
trace each of his characters' ancestries in order to show that a
person's fate was as much the result of heredity as of
environment.  Thus, Zola's novels were, in effect, laboratory
tests on imaginary people. 

  Many readers of The Jungle argue that Sinclair adopted Zola's
technique and used it to prove his case against capitalism.
Other readers feel it is misleading to call Sinclair a Zolaist.
For one thing, Zola believed that one's nature--whether good or
evil, for instance--was completely determined by heredity.
Sinclair didn't share this belief.  In The Jungle he puts the
blame for the wrongs people commit against one another on the
environment.  It's the economic system, he says, that forces
people to be evil in order to survive. 

  As might be expected, Sinclair's cure for weaknesses in human
nature also differed from Zola's.  Zola believed that a
combination of medicine and education could overcome the effects
of heredity and lead to the perfection of human nature.
Sinclair's cure for the ills of industrial America was a new
environment--a socialist economy, where cooperation would
replace competition. 

  There are other, differences between the two writers'
approaches to their subjects.  Zola's characters are trapped in
a web of circumstance from which they cannot escape.  His books
end tragically, without hope.  The Jungle, however, ends on a
positive note--with a socialist victory in sight, if not in
hand.  And Jurgis is not trapped.  On the contrary, his
discovery of socialism and conversion to it liberates him. 

  Finally, there's nothing dispassionately scientific about
Sinclair's approach to his subject.  You know whose side he's on
as soon as you read the book's dedication:  "To the Workingmen
of America." The Jungle is not a cool-headed clinical experiment
of the sort Zola felt he was conducting.  It's an unvarnished
piece of propaganda for socialism and against the destructive
form of capitalism that was practiced in Sinclair's day. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  STYLE 

  Sinclair's style is simple and direct.  He was not a
"literary" writer, interested in using language in new or
startling ways to advance the form of the novel.  "Few writers
seemed to write less for the sake of literature," the critic
Alfred Kazin has written of Sinclair's work as a whole.  "First
things came first; the follies of capitalism, the dangers of
drinking, the iniquities of wealthy newspapers and universities
came first." 

  Still, in The Jungle Sinclair uses language effectively, and
in a variety of ways, to shape his characters and develop his
themes.  Direct statement is his strength, but he makes good use
of symbols, too.  A description of a hog slaughtering turns out
to be an allegory about the immigrant's fate in industrial
America.  (See the discussion of chapter 3.) Belching
smokestacks and the smell of rotting garbage suggests an
impression of hell on earth.  (See chapter 2.) 

  Sinclair uses strong sensory imagery that many of his more
refined readers in 1906 found repugnant.  Stockyards and dumps
are smelly places--Sinclair makes sure we know just how smelly.
He makes us hear the "broom, broom" of a cello and feel the
slippery flesh that makes work so dangerous for beef boners.  He
makes us see what, in ordinary life, we might recoil from:
garbage, the slaughtering process, a greasy midwife with blood
"splashed upon her clothing and her face." 

  Sinclair relies heavily on figures of speech (metaphors and
similes) to remind us that he's serious about comparing life in
turn-of-the-century America with life in a jungle.  Enraged,
Jurgis breathes deeply "like a wounded bull" (simile).  His foe,
Connor, is "the great beast" (metaphor). 

  Like the symbolism, such figures of speech help give many
passages in the book a poetic quality, forcing you to dig
beneath the surface of the words for meaning. 

  But you never have to dig too deeply.  There's nothing
deceptive about Sinclair.  He wants you to understand him easily
and well. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  POINT OF VIEW 

  Who's telling the story?  Whose point of view does the
narrator reflect? 

  The answer depends on which narrator you're talking about,
for there are at least two narrators in The Jungle.  One, the
omniscient author, is rather god-like and all-knowing, setting
scenes, summarizing events, and moving in and out of different
characters' minds.  The other is more of a commentator--an
editorial writer who lashes out at one iniquity or another,
telling us what to look at and how to think about what we see.
This second narrator often knows more than his characters do,
and he's not shy about sharing his insights with us. 

  The narrator's double identity can be confusing.  At one
point, the omniscient narrator describes some police officers
and some strike-breaking goons, including Jurgis, taking off
after strikers.  In the fracas, Jurgis and a couple of cops
break up and rob a saloon.  The second narrator tells us what
Jurgis cannot possibly know--that a few thousand biased
newspapers will report the episode as a riot, a reason to
condemn the strikers.  Sinclair obviously thought he needed the
switch in narrators to make his statement. 

  He makes similar switches elsewhere, especially in muckraking
passages.  Sinclair is an incurable explainer.  When he thinks
that the conventional narrator can't get his point across, he
steps in himself.  But not once do we view a scene through the
eyes of one of his characters. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  FORM AND STRUCTURE 

  The Jungle consists of 31 chapters, all designed to move the
reader--and its hero--along the path to socialism.  On the way,
our guide (Sinclair) makes us pause and examine the surrounding
landscape--the jungle of predators, the prey and the traps for
the weak or unwary.  It's here--in the form of short or long
passages--that the muckraking takes place, exposing the
absurdities of the economic system or the perfidies of the
packers and crooked public officials.  As might be expected, the
pacing of the plot is somewhat jerky.  Sinclair rushes to tell
his story, then stops in his tracks--for a paragraph or a whole
section of a chapter--to explore a subject that outrages him. 

  Overall, the novel follows a conversion pattern--one in which
its hero passes through stages of pride, doubt, and despair, to
his awakening and salvation.  Jurgis is, for the most part, in
the grip of forces beyond his control, though eventually he
finds his footing and takes control of his life. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  THE STORY 

  The word propaganda has a negative ring to it today.  We
usually use it to mean a systematic effort--in the press or
through art, for example--to spread ideas that are probably
false.  Furthermore, we tend to think that propaganda has no
place in novels or paintings. 

  Sinclair rejected the word's negative connotation and the
bias against propaganda in art.  To him, propaganda was simply
an attempt to convince others of one's point of view.  And far
from diluting art, propaganda strengthened it, Sinclair felt. 

  In the chapter-by-chapter analysis that follows, we will look
at The Jungle primarily as Sinclair did--as a propaganda novel
and a call to arms.  We will examine the techniques he used to
sell his particular vision of industrial capitalism and his
prescription for a cure. 

  Some of the techniques he uses are found more often in
nonfiction than in fiction.  Sinclair leans heavily upon the
documentary approach of the historian, for example.  At times,
he approaches his subject as if he were a muckraker composing an
expose for a magazine.  At other times--particularly in the
final chapters--he makes a direct, reasoned appeal to the
reader, much like a pamphlet writer. 

  Clearly, Sinclair wears several hats in The Jungle, He is a
dramatizer, a historian, a muckraker, and a pamphleteer.  (Some
readers argue that he wears a fifth hat--that of a Naturalist
disciple of the French novelist, Emile Zola.  See the Themes
section of this guide.) For a full appreciation of The Jungle,
it will be helpful if you learn to sort out the different roles
the author plays. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 1 

  Sinclair uses the opening chapter to introduce you to his
major characters and their Old World values, and to foreshadow
the tragic events to come.  This chapter demonstrates how gifted
he is as a dramatizer. 

  The book opens in medias res--Latin for in the middle of
things.  It's four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon in November
1900.  The wedding of Ona Lukoszaite and Jurgis Rudkus is over,
and the wedding feast is about to begin.  The guests are
arriving at a saloon, whose back room has been rented for the
occasion. 

  Without doubt, this is an event--not just for the wedding
party, but for the children who live back of the yards in
Chicago's stockyard district, which Sinclair calls Packingtown.
Marija Berczynskas, Ona's cousin and the impatient organizer of
the day, has been accusing her carriage driver of dawdling "all
the way down Ashland Avenue." Her exuberance has attracted a
crowd of adults and children, some of whom will be invited to
join the veselija, as the wedding feast is called. 

  NOTE:  USE OF CONTRASTS Keep an eye throughout the chapter on
the way Sinclair uses contrasts to create characters.  "Ona was
blue-eyed and fair, while Jurgis had great black eyes with
beetling brows." Jurgis has "mighty shoulders and...  giant
hands," yet, as the party begins, he is timid to the point of
seeming as "frightened as a hunted animal." 

  The party--like any party--opens with great expectations
among the guests.  And, for the most part, their expectations
are fulfilled.  It is a joyful occasion, especially in its
opening hours.  But there's an unmistakable undercurrent of
sadness here, of pain.  Before the party ends, that sadness will
become the dominant mood.  By then, most everyone will be drunk
or asleep or both, but Teta Elzbieta, Ona's stepmother, and
Marija, usually unconquerable, will be "sobbing loudly." 

  Why?  What has caused this Old World custom of the
veselija--one to which the poor Lithuanians in Packingtown
"cling with all the power of their souls"--to turn sour?
Sinclair drops a lot of clues throughout this earthy,
bittersweet chapter.  In so doing, he hints at many of the
tragedies that lie ahead.  The chapter's mood swings--from
optimism to despair and back to a guarded optimism--foreshadow
the novel's pattern and the emotional rollercoaster ride that
Jurgis is about to embark on. 

  As we learn, the guests are happiest when they can forget not
only their cares, but where they are and what they are--peasants
transplanted to an alien, unforgiving environment.  And, for a
while, they are able to do this.  In a tiny room, they try to
recreate, just for a day, the traditions of the Old World.  Led
by Marija, the women bustle about, cooking and serving food.
The musicians, led by Tamoszius Kuszeleika, play badly, but no
one cares.  "This music is their music, music of home.  It
stretches out its arms to them....  Chicago and its saloons and
its slums fade away....  They behold home landscapes and
childhood scenes returning; old loves and friendships begin to
waken." 

  NOTE:  SINCLAIR'S USE OF MUSIC Watch the way Sinclair uses
music to foreshadow and underscore his points here.  "This scene
must be read, or said, or sung, to music," Sinclair writes.  The
guests are inspired and transported by the irrepressible playing
of Tamoszius, the first violin.  But a counterpoint to the
frenetic violin is the sound of the cello:  "one long-drawn and
lugubrious note after another." 

  Thus Sinclair reminds us that the party has two moods--one
gay and one sad.  As the party reaches its lowest point, the
band switches from Lithuanian music to a "merciless" American
pop tune. 

  Reality intrudes when Dede Antanas, Jurgis's father, rises to
speak.  His work in the damp, cold "pickle rooms at Durham's"--a
meat-packing concern--has brought back an old respiratory
disease, and he can barely talk without coughing.  He is
convinced he is dying.  His speech is more a farewell than a
congratulatory message, and he leaves his listeners weeping. 

  The delicatessen owner, Jokubas Szedvilas, tries to cheer up
the guests with a little speech.  His off-color allusions to
marriage's sexual pleasures delight the young men but cause Ona,
who is delicate and "not quite 16," to blush. 

  When the dancing begins, Sinclair hints at other problems
that are gnawing at these people.  Among them is a generation
gap between parents and children.  The young prefer the
two-step, an American dance; the older people prefer the
complicated dances they learned in Lithuania.  The young affect
the latest style of clothing; they wouldn't be caught dead in
the clothes their elders wear--embroidered vests or bodices
brought from Europe. 

  As Sinclair introduces us to more and more people, we see
that no one is completely free.  Lucija and Jokubas Szedvilas
have had to mortgage their delicatessen to pay their rent.
Aniele Jukniene, widowed, sick, and mother of three children,
takes in washing and raises chickens on garbage.  These are
defeated people, Sinclair suggests; yet with heroic energy, they
pour themselves into the traditional wedding feast as a way of
denying their fate.  "Bit by bit these poor people have given up
everything else; but...  they cannot give up the veselija!  To
do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to
acknowledge defeat--and the difference between these two things
is what keeps the world going." 

  A calamity befalls the newlyweds when the contributions of
the guests don't add up to the expenses of the veselija.  In
Lithuania, everyone contributes what he can after dancing with
the bride in a ceremony called the acziavimas.  But in America
the tradition breaks down.  In "the new country, all this was
changing; it seemed as if there must be some subtle poison in
the air that one breathed here--it was affecting all the young
men at once." 

  NOTE:  USE OF FOREIGN PHRASES Throughout this chapter and the
rest of the novel, Sinclair employs Lithuanian words and phrases
for authenticity.  He rarely translates the words, but instead
puts them in a context that reveals their probable meaning. 

  Some young men fill themselves with food and drink and sneak
off.  Others march out defiantly.  They have adopted the
competitive code of jungle animals--take or be taken from, kill
or be killed--that shapes the lives of every character in the
novel.  Jurgis considers fighting with the freeloaders but holds
himself back.  An optimist, Jurgis is proud of his strength (he
can carry a 250-pound quarter of beef "without a stagger") and
his ability to earn money.  "We will pay...  somehow," he tells
Ona.  "I will work harder." 

  Ona has heard this vow before, in Lithuania and New York,
where officials had cheated them.  Hearing it again gives her
heart.  She thinks how wonderful it is "to have a husband...
who could solve all problems, and who was so big and strong!" 

  If she had spoken her thought aloud, chances are that
Jurgis--naive male chauvinist that he is--would have agreed with
her.  But you've read the chapter closely enough to know better.
This is a new world, one they don't understand.  "A rule made in
the forests of Lithuania is hard to apply in the stockyards
district of Chicago, with its quarter of a million inhabitants,"
Sinclair tells us. 

  Moreover, there are big bills to pay--some of them padded,
like the one they expect to get from Graiczunas, the
saloon-keeper.  "The saloon-keeper stood in with all the big
politics men in the district." 

  NOTE:  MUCKRAKING You can view The Jungle as a series of
exposes--of child labor, rigged horse races, political graft,
sexual harassment at work, dangerous working conditions,
unsanitary housing, unfair labor practices, real estate fraud,
vote fraud, and so on.  In this chapter Sinclair uncovers the
way saloon-keepers cheat their customers, the way workers suffer
when their employers take no responsibility for on-the-job
injuries and the way workers are unfairly penalized for
lateness.  He explores these themes in depth in later
chapters. 

  Sinclair has plunged a knife into this veselija, and as the
chapter ends, he gives the knife a little twist.  It is three
o'clock in the morning.  Everyone except Ona is "literally
burning alcohol." Yet the dancers still move across the floor,
unable to stop, to let go of the moment, the release that the
day has given them.  The music has changed, from Old World tunes
to a popular American song.  Soon--in four hours--all will be
dancing to another "American tune"--the packers'--at work. 

  If they fail to show up, they will lose their jobs to members
of "the hungry mob that waits every morning at the gates of the
packing houses." Even Ona has been unable to persuade her boss
at Brown's, one of the largest packing houses, to give her a day
off. 

  Jurgis feels confident enough to flout her boss.  He carries
Ona--"small for her age, a mere child"--the two blocks from the
saloon to their home.  "You will not go to Brown's today," he
tells her. 

  Ona has spent the night in alternating states of excitement
and terror.  She gasps, but Jurgis insists.  "Leave it to me,"
he says.  "I will earn more money--I will work harder." 

  Is this just macho bluster on Jurgis's part?  Or does he
really believe that hard work will be enough to ensure their
survival in this harsh new world?  As the story unfolds,
Sinclair will spell out his own view, too.  Chapter 1 has
already given you a pretty good idea of what that view is. 

  NOTE:  STYLISTIC TECHNIQUES Notice how Sinclair shifts
tenses--from past to present, twice--as a way of putting you in
the action much of the time.  Also note the occasional inverted
phrase ("Most fearful they are to contemplate, the expenses of
this entertainment.").  Now and then, Sinclair tries to mimic
the speech patterns of the immigrants as a way of getting you to
share their point of view.  How well do these techniques work
for you? 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 2 

  Here Sinclair begins five chapters of flashbacks.  Their
purpose is to fill you in on the events that led up to the
wedding, to contrast the Old World with the New, and to help you
understand what motivates some of the characters, especially
Jurgis. 

  NOTE:  PLOT vs.  STORY The chronological story Sinclair has
to tell actually begins in the third paragraph of this chapter.
The plot is not chronological; it doesn't present events in the
order in which they happened. 

  Why not?  A good storyteller is a tease.  He sets up a
problem--in this case, "Will hard work help Jurgis and Ona beat
the odds?"--then in bits and pieces gives you the clues you need
to solve the problem.  Ideally, each clue should whet your
appetite for another.  A nonchronological plot helps add to the
suspense. 

  The chapter opens with three transitional paragraphs which
ease us into Jurgis's past life.  We learn the answer to our
question about Jurgis's sincerity immediately.  He really does
believe that his ability to work--and work hard--sets him apart
from other men.  And four months in America has only increased
this young giant's belief in his own invincibility.  When he
hears about men who have been broken by their jobs, he just
laughs.  "He could not even imagine how it would feel to be
beaten." So far, his strength and agility have been in such
demand--he was hired at Brown's after only a half hour's
wait--he can't believe anyone would "let" him starve. 

  The comments of the men who hear him boast are a key to his
character--and to the structure of the novel from here on out.
They realize that he's simply naive and inexperienced--that he
has come "from very far in the country." 

  NOTE:  THE NAIF What Sinclair is doing is creating in Jurgis
a classic literary type called a naif, a simple, inexperienced
person who, in the course of a story has his blinders knocked
off by a series of calamities.  Mark Twain's Huck Finn is a
naif, and so is Voltaire's Candide.  We expect such a hero to
emerge from his experiences sadder but wiser, with a deeper
understanding of himself and his world.  But there is no
guarantee that even a naif will find wisdom. 

  Jurgis's listeners in Chicago had hit the nail right on the
head.  Jurgis had been brought up in a clearing in the middle of
the Imperial Forest in Lithuania.  More than a country bumpkin,
he was literally, a babe in the woods.  A year and a half before
the wedding, he had ventured out of the forest to sell a couple
of his father's horses.  There he had met Ona, then 14 years
old--about 11 years his junior.  Jurgis is so naive that he asks
her father, "a rich man," to sell her to him for two horses.
Ona's father turns Jurgis down. 

  When Jurgis returns a few months later, Ona's father has
died, and his farm has been sold to satisfy creditors.  Ona is
drawn to Jurgis but won't marry him because of her love for her
stepmother, Elzbieta.  Elzbieta's brother Jonas, "a dried-up
little man," suggests that they go to America, where a friend of
his had become highly successful. 

  The idea appeals to Jurgis.  "He would go to America and
marry, and be a rich man in the bargain." And if he failed to
become rich?  No matter.  "In that country, rich or poor, a man
was free, it was said; he did not have to go into the army, he
did not have to pay out his money to rascally officials--he
might do as he pleased, and count himself as good as any other
man." 

  By putting these thoughts in the mind of a naif, Sinclair is
telling us how to judge them.  They are false hopes destined to
be shattered.  "If one could only manage to get the price of a
passage," Jurgis thinks, "he could count his troubles at an
end." Sinclair seems to be setting Jurgis up for
disappointment. 

  Note how Jurgis gets the money for his passage.  He spends a
winter building a railroad in Smolensk--"a fearful experience,
with filth and bad food and cruelty and overwork." "When they
paid him off he dodged the company gamblers and dramshops
[bars], and so they tried to kill him; but he escaped." 

  This episode is worth thinking about for two reasons.  It's
the first glimpse we get of "jungle" life under capitalism.
(Russia would remain firmly capitalistic for another 17 years.)
Even on his way home, Jurgis has to sleep "always with one eye
open," on the lookout for predators.  Second, the passage
suggests that Sinclair's argument is not with America but with
an economic system--one that can be found anywhere. 

  Chicago, where "Jonas's friend had gotten rich," nearly
overwhelms the newcomers.  There are 12 of them:  Jurgis, Dede
Antanas, Jonas, Ona, Marija (Ona's cousin, who is twenty years
old), and Elzbieta and her six children.  They spend their first
night in a police station.  The next morning they are taught a
new word, "stockyards," and put aboard a trolley headed there. 

  The trolley ride further foreshadows the fate that awaits
them.  The buildings in the promised land are "ugly and dirty."
Smoke pollutes the air and earth and darkens the sky.  As they
approach Packingtown, fields become "parched and yellow, the
landscape hideous and bare." Everywhere, there's a "strange,
pungent odor." They can't place it.  "It was an elemental odor,
raw and crude"--very like the smell of the jungle. 

  When they arrive at the stockyards, they notice chimneys
belching smoke that "might have come from the center of the
world." They are disturbed by an "elemental" sound--the lowing
and grunting of thousands of cattle and pigs in the distance. 

  By chance, they pass the delicatessen owned by Jokubas
Szedvilas, "the mythical friend who had made his fortune in
America." Jokubas becomes their mentor and guide and sends them
to the home of the widow Aniele Jukniene.  Her filthy four-room
flat is full of lodgers, anywhere from six to fourteen people in
a room.  It's the worst accommodation Jurgis and his extended
family have seen in all their travels, but they make do. 

  Jurgis has already been disabused of one preconception.  The
high prices have made him realize he will not get rich, a
letdown not made any easier by the fact that they're spending
the money they brought with them faster than expected. 

  But again Jurgis is irrepressible.  "Tomorrow," he says
matter-of-factly, "I will get a job, and perhaps Jonas will get
one also; and then we can get a place of our own." 

  Jurgis and Ona go for a walk, giving Sinclair a chance to do
some muckraking.  The houses have been built on land "made" out
of a city dump.  The stench is overpowering, suggesting "all the
dead things of the universe." Along the neglected roadways,
children play in potholes "full of stinking green water." In a
dump site that's still being filled, other children rake through
garbage. 

  Ona and Jurgis aren't dismayed.  Characteristically, they are
impressed at the efficient way the land is used; to build
bricks, a brick company had excavated the land now used for the
dump.  Nearby is another hole full of polluted, "festering"
water that in wintertime will be sold as ice. 

  What is this awful place they're in?  The belching chimneys
and the smell of death suggest it may be hell.  To emphasize the
metaphor, Sinclair evokes some satanic imagery.  At sunset, "the
sky in the West turned blood red, and the tops of the houses
shone like fire." 

  But do Jurgis and Ona make the connection?  Of course not.
They're looking away from the sunset, toward Packingtown!  And
the sunset light is playing tricks on them.  The smoke which had
this afternoon been so frightening is now multicolored.  In the
twilight the great packinghouses offer "a vision of power...  a
dream of wonder, with its tale of human energy...  of
opportunity and freedom, of life and love and joy." 

  Misreading all the clues as usual, Jurgis feels a surge of
confidence.  "Tomorrow," he says, "I shall go there and get a
job!" 

  NOTE:  SHIFTING POINT OF VIEW Sinclair's narrators often step
forward and lectures us about subjects his characters can know
little or nothing about.  We get a glimpse of that habit in the
last scene, when he muckrakes about the dump or explains how
unhealthy water is sold as ice in winter. 

  This shifting point of view may bother readers who prefer
narrators to stay close to their characters and make discoveries
with them.  Remember, though, that Sinclair has chosen to play
several roles:  dramatizer, muckraker, historian, and
pamphleteer.  He often changes roles abruptly, sounding like a
novelist in one line and an outraged magazine writer in the
next.  If these changes disturb you, they are probably too
abrupt, a flaw in Sinclair's technique. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 3 

  The flashback continues the next day as Jokubas takes the
newcomers on a tour of Packingtown--the stockyards and
packinghouses.  The tour gives Sinclair a chance to introduce
some metaphors that make turn-of-the-century Chicago such an
ideal setting for The Jungle. 

  In the morning, one of the bosses at Brown's picks Jurgis out
of the crowd of jobseekers and tells him to start the next day.
So the outing afterwards is a celebration, making Jurgis even
more resistant than usual to negative interpretations of what he
sees and hears. 

  Jokubas is an ebullient guide.  Sinclair is wearing his
historian's hat through much of this chapter and lets Jokubas
spout the data he (Sinclair) had gathered on the stockyard
operations.  We learn that the plants "process" about 30,000
animals a day, that in the cattle pens there are 25,000 gates,
and in the stockyards, 250 miles of railroad track.  These are
the sort of facts public relations people drum up to impress
outsiders, and they make their mark.  When Jokubas rattles them
off, "his guests cry out with wonder," and Jurgis swells with
pride.  "Had he not...  become a sharer in all this activity, a
cog in this marvelous machine?" 

  The pace, efficiency, and size of the packing-house
operations leave him awestruck. 

  NOTE:  ALLEGORY OF THE HOGS When a writer tells the story
through symbols--using animals, for instance, to stand for human
beings--he is said to be speaking allegorically.  Sinclair
creates this kind of symbolic narrative by suggesting that the
hogs, who climb the chutes leading to their deaths "by the power
of their own legs," are like the immigrants who flock to
Packingtown. 

  Read this passage closely.  Note the many comparisons between
hogs and humans.  Some readers think Sinclair goes overboard
with the analogy when he talks of "the hog-squeal of the
universe" and a "god of hogs, to whom this hog-personality was
precious." But in this allegory is an echo of The Jungle's major
theme:  Industrial capitalism--an efficient, impersonal
"slaughtering machine"--sacrifices its workers in a horrible
way. 

  The group visits the place where cattle are slaughtered--and
watches men on the "killing bed" work "with furious intensity,
literally on the run." The half-inch pool of blood they work in
"must have made the floor slippery, but no one could have
guessed this by watching the men at work." 

  What you see, Sinclair hints, is not what you get--whether
you are a worker or a consumer.  "The visitors did not see any
more than the packers wanted them to," Jokubas whispers.  He
translates signs demanding cleanliness, while offering to take
his guests "to the secret rooms where the spoiled meats went to
be doctored." He points out a government inspector assigned to
inspect hog carcasses for tuberculosis.  A "sociable person,"
Jokubas explains, might divert the inspector's attention while
"a dozen carcasses were passing untouched." 

  To Jurgis, it is almost sacrilegious to speak with skepticism
of the Beef Trust (the several companies that made up Chicago's
packing industry)--"a thing as tremendous as the universe." The
big plants "were really all one," Jokubas confides.  (Readers in
1906 would have interpreted that phrase as an accusation that
the owners of the big packinghouses conspired to fix prices,
keep wages low, and smother competition. 

  Jurgis becomes a convert to the view that the laws and ways
of Packingtown (or, more broadly, Big Business) are not to be
questioned or understood any more readily than the universe,
"that this whole huge establishment had taken him under its
protection, and had become responsible for his welfare." 

  The chapter ends with a wicked allusion to the Sherman
Anti-Trust Act of 1890, which supposedly outlawed concentrations
of economic power such as the Beef Trust.  Sinclair refers to it
as the "law of the land" that requires the meat packers "to be
deadly rivals" and encourages them "to ruin each other under
penalty of fine and imprisonment!" It's a law, Sinclair
suggests, that sanctions the predatory order of the jungle by
insisting on competitive practices.  As you will see later on,
Sinclair wants to substitute cooperation for competition in
economic life. 

  NOTE:  ADVERTISING SIGNS Eighty years ago, when our consumer
economy was just finding its legs, advertisements could be as
distracting as they are today.  Note how Sinclair, almost as an
aside, rails against "placards that defaced the landscape,"
"silly little jingles," and "gaudy pictures." Chapter 5 will
open with a more light-hearted assault on the advertiser's art.
Chapter 31 contains an economic argument against advertising. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 4 

  This chapter gives Sinclair a chance to show how easily newly
arrived immigrants can be taken in by people determined to
defraud them.  And it gives you a chance to study how a writer
can communicate panic and tension by stepping up the pace of his
narrative. 

  Sinclair begins by describing Jurgis's first day on the
killing beds, sweeping entrails into a trap in the floor.  He is
delighted with the money he earns--17 1/2 cents an hour, more
than $1.50 for the 12-hour day.  Back at Aniele's lodging house,
there's a celebration, because Jonas and Marija have been
offered jobs.  Marija will be doing skilled piecework, painting
cans.  Jonas will push a hand truck at Durham's. 

  Jurgis has decided that the older children will go to school
and that Elzbieta and Ona will stay home to keep house.  Dede
Antanas--too old for a job in America, Jurgis is told--has spent
two days seeking work, with no luck.  The packers discard men
once they grow old, Jokubas explains.  His comment underlines
the novel's theme that capitalist industries wear out their
workers, then turn away from them. 

  An advertisement for a house catches Jurgis's eye and
persuades the family to consider buying their own home.  They're
easy marks for the smooth-talking real estate agent.  Just how
easy, Sinclair makes clear in a detailed account of the
negotiations that lead up to the purchase.  Jurgis, who is
illiterate, can't calculate how much they'll need to make the
monthly payments.  Luckily, "Ona was like lightning at such
things." The dingy one-story house, which the agent is trying to
pawn off as new, is full of defects, but the peasant family
"tried to shut their eyes" to them. 

  Jokubas warns them not to buy.  He's seen too many people
"done to death in this 'buying a home' swindle." But the family
is desperate--they must move somewhere.  Besides, Jurgis tells
himself, "others might have failed at it, but he was not the
failing kind--he would show them how to do it.  He would work
all day, and all night, too, if need be." 

  Since Jurgis can't get a day off, he sends Ona and Elzbieta
with Jokubas to sign the deed and make the down payment.  But
Jokubas, worldly as he is compared to the others, can't make any
sense of the contract.  It seems to provide only for the renting
of the property--$12 a month for eight years. 

  From here to the end of the chapter, watch Sinclair speed up
his story to make you feel the panic of the bewildered peasants.
A lawyer who is on a first-name basis with the agent assures
them that "it was all perfectly regular." Elzbieta makes the
$300 down payment, and the women go home "with a deadly terror
gnawing at their souls." Jurgis hears their tale and rushes out
to find another lawyer, who reads the deed and explains that all
is in order.  So long as they make all the payments, the house
will be theirs.  Jurgis is so relieved, that he can't see that
the hurdle of regular payments may be impossibly high.  Back at
Aniele's, everything is in an uproar; the women thought he had
left to murder the agent.  Overwhelmed by tension, Ona and
Elzbieta sob themselves to sleep. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 5 

  NOTE:  THE SUMMARY NARRATIVE APPROACH Sinclair handles this
chapter differently than the last half of Chapter 4.  There, he
dramatized the action, using scenes and dialogue to give it life
before our eyes.  Here, he merely sums up the action with
descriptive passages.  Some readers welcome the change of pace.
It gives them a chance to catch their breaths and provide a
"kicking-off point" for the next dramatic surge.  Besides, they
say, Sinclair sounds at times like a textbook writer, because
The Jungle covers so much ground. 

  Other readers feel that Sinclair relies too heavily on the
techniques of summary narrative.  In so doing, they say, he
keeps the action and the characters at a distance, making it
hard for us to identify with them. 

  Sinclair begins this chapter by poking fun at the type of
advertisements that so annoyed him in Chapter 3.  He ends with
Jurgis "having begun to see at last how those might be right who
had laughed at him for his faith in America." 

  On the "advice" of an advertisement, the family falls into
another trap of the capitalist jungle--buying household
furnishings on the installment plan.  Too absorbed with the
"never-ending delight" of fixing up their house, they don't
notice how the debt increases their vulnerability to economic
catastrophe. 

  On the job, Jurgis is still a naif.  The bosses keep the men
working at a frantic pace by "speeding up the gang," but he
doesn't mind.  He likes being kept busy and can't understand why
the union should try to slow the pace to protect the men who
can't keep up.  Without knowing it, Jurgis shares the classic
capitalist belief in laissez faire--the freedom to succeed or
fail in economic life without interference. 

  And yet, his father's failure so far to find a job troubles
him.  Why, Jurgis wonders, are the old people shunned in
industrial America? 

  This "crack in the fine structure of Jurgis's faith in things
as they are" widens when he hears about a job offer for Antanas.
Someone at Durham's has promised him a job for a price:
one-third of his pay.  Tamoszius Kuszleika, the amateur
violinist who led the musicians at the wedding feast, explains
to Jurgis that "such cases of petty graft" are common. 

  NOTE:  TAMOSZIUS'S VIEW OF INDUSTRY Tamoszius's description
of the way the plants are run reflects Sinclair's dour view of
industrial organization.  "...from top to bottom the place was
simply a seething cauldron of jealousies and hatreds; there was
no loyalty or decency anywhere about it, there was no place in
it where a man counted for anything against a dollar." The place
is a jungle, where even "men of the same rank were pitted
against each other." 

  What a horrible job Antanas gets.  Sinclair puts on his
muckraker's hat and tells how Antanas earns his money cleaning
the pickle (chemical) room.  The chemicals for curing canned
beef are reused no matter how contaminated they get, and the
meat sludge that gets caught in the drains is retrieved for
canning.  Antanas is unwillingly part of a conspiracy to cheat
and possibly endanger the health of consumers.  And so is Jurgis
in his job, when he helps process unborn calves and cattle that
have died on the way to the slaughterhouse. 

  This discovery is a major blow to Jurgis's "faith in
America." So is the news that Marija owes her job to the boss's
decision to fire a mother who took sick and that Jonas replaced
a worker injured on the job.  Like vultures, they are profiting
from others' misfortunes.  Sinclair has begun to knock the
blinders from Jurgis's eyes. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 6 

  Sinclair continues the education of Jurgis by revealing how
real estate agents take advantage of the poor and by beginning
an expose of child labor.  All this may not sound like the stuff
of fiction to you.  But notice how carefully Sinclair integrates
the facts and figures of his research into the story. 

  "Jurgis judged everything by the criterion of its helping or
hindering their union." He's losing his naivete; yet for Ona's
sake he's willing to stand any hardship and overlook "the tricks
and cruelties he saw at Durham's." 

  He and Ona want to forego tradition and get married at once,
but Elzbieta won't hear of it.  So they postpone the event until
they can raise money for the wedding feast. 

  A visit from Grandmother Majauszkiene, a wise old neighbor,
brings them the bad news that they've been swindled.  The house
is not new; at least four families have lived there before and
were evicted when they missed payments.  Moreover, the true
monthly payments are $17, not $12.  No one had told them about
the interest!  "You are like the rest," the old lady says, "they
trick you and eat you alive"--like animals in a real jungle. 

  Jurgis swears to "work harder," but for the first time he
begins to realize that the forces arrayed against him are more
powerful than he.  Ona gets a job sewing covers on hams after
bribing the forelady.  Elzbieta finds a priest to certify that
Stanislovas, her oldest son, is 16--two years beyond his true
age.  Armed with his certificate, Stanislovas gets a job at
Durham's filling cans with lard. 

  Stanislovas isn't the only child in America who must go to
work instead of school.  He's one of almost two million children
working for about 50 cents a day, six days a week. 

  At the chapter's end, Sinclair returns to the young lovers.
Ona and Jurgis "have calculated that the added income leaves
"them just about as they had been before!" 

  NOTE:  CHARACTERIZATION OF GRANDMOTHER MAJAUSZKIENE The old
lady is an interesting figure, partly because she is the first
socialist we meet.  Sinclair portrays her as a
witch--"unrelenting, typifying fate." And so she appears to the
family.  She "had lived in the midst of misfortune so long that
it had come to be her element, and she talked about starvation,
sickness, and death as other people might about weddings and
holidays." 

  Like Shakespeare's witches, she can foretell the future.
Note, especially, her remark that their house is unlucky, that
someone is bound to get consumption.  This prophecy will come
true in the next chapter. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 7 

  After a transitional paragraph, the flashback ends, and the
story picks up after the wedding feast in Chapter 1.  More than
$100 in debt, Ona and Jurgis must begin their married life with
the "lash of want" cracking over their heads. 

  Jurgis resolves to protect Ona "against the horror he saw
about them." And yet he fails when Ona, too poor to own a
raincoat, gets sick after a drenching downpour.  (In a
mini-expose, Sinclair lays part of the blame on the greed of the
men who own the trolley lines.) 

  The rest of the chapter is a laundry list of the dangers
strewn in the family's path:  advertisements and companies that
lie, the cesspool beneath the house, "doctored" foods,
low-quality winter clothes, bedbugs and roaches. 

  Antanas can't stop coughing.  He's the consumptive that
Grandmother Majauszkiene warned about.  He dies, and Jurgis,
wiser now, negotiates a bargain funeral. 

  The "dreadful winter" joins the list of dangers.  Workers
sicken and are replaced by "starving, penniless men" lined up
for work outside the packing plants.  Sinclair compares the
ailing workers to the weaker branches" that are knocked off
forest trees by winter storms.  The message is clear:  Only the
fittest will survive the winter in Packingtown. 

  NOTE:  THE METAPHOR OF NATURAL SELECTION With his image of
the tree, Sinclair is making a reference to the theories of
Charles Darwin, the English naturalist.  Darwin's theory of
evolution holds that all species continually struggle to
survive.  The species with the best chance for survival, he
felt, are those most able to adapt to their environment.
Species that are the least fit fail to reproduce, and die out. 

  The French writer, Emile Zola, was fascinated by Darwin's
theories and structured his novels to "prove" some of those
ideas.  Readers who feel that The Jungle is a Naturalist novel
structured like Zola's cite this chapter to prove their case. 

  Other readers say that Sinclair used Darwinism and Zolaist
techniques only when they served his purposes--as they do,
clearly, in this chapter.  Darwinism is an apt metaphor for the
process of selection that takes place in Packingtown during the
winter months.  And it allows Sinclair to foreshadow the fate of
Ona, who "was not fitted for a life as this." 

  Conditions at the plants are pitiful.  Men on the killing
floor are hobbled by the blood that turns to ice on their feet.
Those in the cooking rooms--the only place in the plant that's
warm--run the risk of catching cold when they "pass through
ice-cold corridors." 

  Another winter danger is the saloons on "Whiskey Row." They
lure customers by providing essential services for the poor
workers:  warmth, check-cashing, a place to eat near the
plants. 

  In the poetic passage that ends the chapter, Sinclair
personifies the cold, "a living thing, a demon presence." If
you've ever been really cold, you'll understand how the cold can
be "yelling out" or be still as death "as it crept in through
the cracks, reaching out for them with its icy, death-dealing
fingers." 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 8 

  This chapter is a turning point for Jurgis.  His family's
fortunes sink when a slump in the meat-packing business occurs.
Disillusioned, he joins the union, "for he understood that a
fight was on, and that it was his fight." 

  Before introducing this crisis, Sinclair trots out the elfin
musician, Tamoszius, for a bit of comic relief.  He falls in
love with Marija when he discovers that, despite her booming
voice and violent energy, she has "the heart of a baby." He
proposes marriage; she accepts; and they plan a spring
wedding. 

  But their love is doomed.  With the holiday season over,
consumer demand is low, so Marija's canning factory shuts down
until business improves. 

  The slowdown affects the entire industry.  Jurgis has to
report to work each day at seven but is paid only when cattle
are processed--for weeks on end, no more than two hours a day.
He is never paid "broken time"--fractional parts of hours. 

  The injustice makes a union man of him.  This is his second
conversion.  (The first, in Chapter 3, was to Big Business.)
Soon all the working members of his family wear union buttons.
Yet they can't understand why the union can't prevent Marija's
factory from closing.  Unions don't fare well in this novel--the
packers are quicker, stronger, more flexible. 

  Toward the end of the chapter, Sinclair puts another clown on
stage--Tommy Finnegan.  Finnegan corners Jurgis at a union
meeting and rattles on in an Irish brogue about the world of the
spirits.  The entire confrontation takes no more than a
paragraph but is worth noting, because it shows Sinclair's
talent for creating memorable characters in only a few words. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 9 

  This complicated chapter begins with Jurgis in night school
and ends with a worker being rendered into lard.  It gives you
an opportunity to study the narrator as he switches in and out
of several guises:  storyteller, historian, muckraker.
Throughout, Sinclair resorts to summary narrative, the most
efficient way to cover so much territory. 

  Jurgis's union activities have inspired him to learn to speak
and read English.  At the same time, he begins groping with
political concepts.  The union begins to show him what a
democracy can be. 

  In a brief flashback, Sinclair indicates how true democracy
has been corrupted in America.  A night watchman at Durham's
helps him become naturalized so that he can vote.  On election
day, the watchman then pays him $2 to vote Democratic. 

  All this is done with the complicity of business interests
and the police.  That complicity reinforces Sinclair's theme
that business and government work hand-in-hand to corrupt the
democratic process.  Durham's gives Jurgis a half-day off, with
pay, to become naturalized, and two hours off to vote.  At the
polling place, a cop makes sure Jurgis marks his ballot the way
he was told. 

  Friends in the union help him make sense of these
transactions, with a distorted picture of the way our democratic
system works.  "The officials who ruled [the government], and
got all the graft, had to be elected first; and so there were
two rival sets of grafters, known as political parties, and the
one got the office which bought the most votes." 

  Sinclair, the muckraker, gives a scathing portrait of Mike
Scully, boss of Chicago's Democratic machine.  Scully boasts he
is "the people's man," but he's only interested in money and
power.  He has plenty of both, largely due to his position as
patronage chief and intermediary between the city government and
the packers. 

  Sinclair lists some of the packers' crimes:  stealing city
water, selling condemned meat in Illinois, adulterating foods,
mislabeling canned goods.  He describes the occupational
diseases and injuries that threaten packing-house workers:
amputated thumbs, tuberculosis in the cooking rooms, men unable
to stand straight, fingers eaten off by acid, rheumatism, and
more.  The list ends with Sinclair's most sensational
revelation:  men tumbling into cooking vats and being rendered
into lard. 

  Theodore Roosevelt's investigators, checking up on Sinclair's
allegations, could find no proof of the man-into-lard story.
But it doesn't matter.  It was the metaphor Sinclair was after.
Figuratively, if not literally, the workers' lives were being
destroyed and eaten by the world. 

  NOTE:  USE OF LITERARY ALLUSIONS Sinclair read widely, and he
tends to litter The Jungle with references to his favorite books
and authors.  For instance, he says that a cattle butcher's
descriptions of diseased cattle "would have been worthwhile for
a Dante or Zola." 

  Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) depicted Hell in graphic detail
in his classic poem The Divine Comedy.  Emile Zola was famous
for his unflinchingly realistic descriptions of the seamy side
of everyday life. 

  Some readers have raised objections to these allusions on the
grounds that they are out of character.  For example, the
illiterate Jurgis would never have drawn a connection between
Dante, Zola, and the butcher.  Once more, Sinclair has simply
stepped into the story to interpret events for us as Sinclair,
not as one of his characters. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 10 

  Sinclair moves ahead with his story, focusing on the family's
domestic life.  Marija's factory is still closed.  Jurgis is
earning only about half his regular wages.  Worry and fear stalk
the family; they're not sure why.  "They were willing to work
all the time; and when people do their best, ought they not be
able to keep alive?" 

  Trapped in a consumer economy, "There never seemed to be an
end to the things they had to buy." Insurance on the house,
taxes, water fees--Jurgis pried this bad news out of the
agent. 

  Spring comes, then summer.  Sinclair addresses you directly,
forcing you to compare your summer pleasures with the grueling
routines of "men and women and children who...  never saw any
green thing, not even a flower." 

  Workers can never forget that they are on the bottom.
"People who worked with their hands were a class apart, and were
made to feel it." When Sinclair makes a statement like that, you
can be sure he'll find a plot twist to prove it.  Sure enough,
Marija's canning factory opens, but she "forgets her place" and
loses her job.  Her crime was to challenge the supervisor for
not crediting her with work she had done.  In time, she gets a
job trimming beef at half her earlier wage.  But she has been
hurt and made to recognize her own vulnerability. 

  Marija's fate is an unfortunate object lesson for Ona.  Ona
is having problems with her forelady, Miss Henderson, who, as a
sideline, recruits Ona's co-workers for a brothel.  Prostitution
and sexual harassment are rampant in Packingtown.  Sinclair
compares the harassment with the situation that existed "under
the system of chattel slavery." Yet in Packingtown, there is "no
difference in color between master and slave." 

  It's an ominous clue, this comparison between wage slaves and
chattel slaves.  Ona is not a strong person.  How will she
resist her "brutal and inscrupulous" masters if they demand
sexual favors?  Especially now, when Marija's experience has
taught Ona not to "forget her place"? 

  Ona has a baby which they name after Jurgis's father.  Little
Antanas makes Jurgis "irrevocably a family man." And yet the
baby brings pain, too--an awareness of how little freedom
workers have to enjoy their children. 

  As for Ona, the family's needs require her to return to work
after only a week at home.  The lack of rest leads to "womb
trouble," and Sinclair is careful to show that Ona's is not an
isolated case.  "The great majority of women...  in Packingtown
suffered in the same way, and from the same cause." 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 11 

  Sinclair is impatient to make his case against capitalism.
He rushes on, relentlessly summarizing the action, pausing for a
welcome line of dialogue at the end of the chapter. 

  The packers expect a strike and are eager to create a pool of
trained workers to replace the strikers.  So they take on more
hands than they need, denying Jurgis overtime and thus reducing
his pay.  Meanwhile, the speed-ups continue. 

  Winter comes, and Jurgis fights a blizzard to get to work.
In his triumph, Jurgis is like "some monarch of the forest that
has vanquished his foe." But he has an accident at work and the
company refuses to accept responsibility.  Confined to bed, he
can no longer contribute to his family's welfare.  Ona draws
money out of their tiny savings account, and they make do. 

  Only little Antanas can distract Jurgis.  Jurgis says, in a
line of dialogue that brings him alive for us, "Look, Muma, he
knows his papa!  He does, he does!  Tu mano szirdele, the little
rascal!" 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 12 

  Like Marija, Jurgis is forced to confront his own limits.  He
returns to work and hobbles through the day.  When the pain
won't let him finish, he weeps "like a child." A doctor orders
him to bed for two months.  Finally, in April he shows up for
work only to discover that his job has been given to another
man. 

  There is no work for him anywhere, and he realizes why.
"They had got the best out of him--they had worn him out, with
their speeding up and their carelessness, and now they had
thrown him away!" 

  It's a common plight.  Jurgis meets other unemployed men and
finds "that they had all had the same experience....  The vast
majority...  were simply the worn-out parts of the great
merciless packing machine." 

  Elzbieta's brother, Jonas, disappears--probably "gone on the
road, seeking happiness." Vilimas, age 11, and Nikalojus, age
10, are pulled out of school and sent to sell newspapers.  They
become streetwise and ride trolleys without paying.  They too
are sinking into the ways of the jungle--learning to take before
being taken. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 13 

  The family slides deeper and deeper into the "social pit."
Kristoforas, one of Elzbieta's two crippled children, dies
suddenly--probably poisoned by a sausage he ate.  Elzbieta begs
money from neighbors for a proper funeral. 

  Desperate, Jurgis takes a job at the fertilizer plant, a
place so horrible men talk about it "in whispers." The plant's
foul odor clings to Jurgis and makes him an outcast. 

  Vilimas and Nikalojus have adapted too well to their
environment to suit Jurgis.  They learn to swear, smoke, and
gamble; and often they sleep downtown in doorways to save
transit time.  So it is decided that Kotrina, who is 13, will
take care of the house, Elzbieta will get a job, and the boys
will return to school. 

  Sinclair gives a detailed description of Elzbieta's job as "a
servant to a 'sausage machine.'" She sits in a damp cellar amid
"a sickening odor of moist flesh," twisting sausages into links.
She is so busy, she has no time to look up at the gallery, from
which visitors "stare at her, as at some wild beast in a
menagerie." 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 14 

  This chapter is partly an expose of the "spoiled-meat
industry" and partly an examination of the general gloom that
has settled over the Rudkus household. 

  Elzbieta becomes an example of the theme that the poor often
work against their best interests.  She now makes the type of
sausage that may have killed Kristoforas.  Among the ingredients
are spoiled and doctored meat; dirt, sawdust, and tuberculosis
germs; rat dung, rat poison, and even the rats themselves!  No
wonder The Jungle outraged Americans in 1906! 

  A pall has fallen over the family.  The adults rarely talk to
each other.  All they have to look forward to are six punishing
years before they're free of house payments.  As for Ona and
Jurgis, "their moods so seldom came together....  It was as if
their hopes were buried in separate graves." 

  Jurgis starts to drink to ease his pain.  But he stops when
he sees his family's despair.  From then on, nearly every moment
"consisted of a struggle with the craving for liquor." 

  We do not see the struggle, of course, because Sinclair does
not dramatize it.  Yet we are told about it convincingly,
perhaps because Sinclair had seen drunkenness in his own home.
(His father died from alcoholism a month after The Jungle
appeared.) 

  Ona is pregnant again and "visibly going to pieces." She has
a cough--the fear is of consumption. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 15 

  Two similes from the animal world crop up in the first
paragraph to remind us of the symbolism suggested by the book's
title.  Ona has a look in her eye that seems to Jurgis "like the
eye of a hunted animal." Jurgis "lives like a dumb beast of
burden." 

  He worries about Ona's frequent outbreaks.  She's holding
back "some terrible thing"; he's sure of it. 

  Just before Thanksgiving, Ona fails to come home.  It was the
snowstorm, she explains the next morning.  It stopped the
trolleys, so she stayed with a friend, Jadvyga Marcinkus. 

  A month later Ona again fails to come home.  Jurgis goes to
Jadvyga's, but Ona isn't there.  What's more, he learns, she
never spent a night there. 

  He visits the place where Ona works, to speak to Ona's
forelady, but Miss Henderson has not shown up.  The trolley
lines from downtown haven't been working since the previous
night. 

  In the afternoon, Jurgis heads home and spots Ona on a
trolley.  He watches her enter their house, then follows.  Ona
confesses that she spent the night at Miss Henderson's.  Jurgis
knows that Henderson lives in a brothel with Phil Connor, head
of the loading gang. 

  Enraged, he nearly strangles Ona.  She explains that Connor
had threatened that her family would lose their jobs unless she
submitted to him.  Then he raped her and forced her to visit the
brothel with him. 

  Ona knows what Jurgis will do.  "You will kill him--and we
shall die." 

  Jurgis takes off "breathing hoarsely, like a wounded bull."
At the yards, he finds his prey and lunges for "the great
beast." A dozen men drag him off, and he is arrested.  But
Jurgis has the passion of a jungle animal.  He has sunk "his
teeth into the man's cheek; and when they tore him away he was
dripping with blood, and little ribbons of skin were hanging in
his mouth." 

  Sinclair's dramatization of the events in this chapter is a
welcome change from so many chapters of straight summary
narrative. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 16 

  In this chapter Sinclair will announce another turning point
for Jurgis--"the beginning of his rebellion, of his outlawry and
his unbelief." He will also portray American justice as "a sham
and a loathsome mockery." 

  When he is booked for assault and battery, Jurgis is careful
not to provoke the police.  The lions of the jungle, their
station house is "their inmost lair." "It was as much a man's
very life was worth to anger them." 

  In his cell, Jurgis wrestles with his conscience.  He
realizes he has made things worse for Ona and little Antanas and
blames himself for not protecting her from "a fate which every
one knew to be so common." She will never get over her adultery,
he fears.  "The shame of it would kill her." It's a blunt
foreshadowing of her fate. 

  In the morning Jurgis is arraigned in front of the notorious
Justice Callahan.  Callahan's nickname, "Growler" Pat, labels
him a jungle dweller.  Sinclair uses a vivid metaphor to tell us
once again that American justice is in the service of business:
"If Scully was the thumb, Pat Callahan was the first finger of
the unseen hand whereby the packers held down the people of the
district." 

  A company lawyer asks Callahan to hold Jurgis for a week.
Callahan quickly orders Jurgis held on $300 bail--almost a
year's wage! 

  His first night at the county jail Jurgis can't sleep.  He
paces "like a wild beast that breaks its teeth on the bars of
its cage." 

  Church bells remind him that it's Christmas Eve, and a rush
of poignant memories come to mind.  He rails against society,
which has destroyed his life, and his family and jailed him "as
if he had been a wild beast." He's still too naive to trace his
problems to the nation's competitive economic system with its
attendant evils.  All he knows is that "society, with all its
powers, had declared itself his foe." 

  Imprisonment has changed his outlook.  His rebellion has
begun.  Sinclair calls on the poet Oscar Wilde to explain why.
In prison, Wilde wrote in his 1898 poem "The Ballad of Reading
Gaol":  "It is only what is good in Man / That wastes and
withers there." 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 17 

  Sinclair structures this chapter in an unusually absorbing
way.  He gives us three dramatic scenes--one comic, one bitter,
one pathetic--and connects each scene with a passage of
exposition. 

  SCENE 1.  Jurgis gets a cellmate--a dapper young safecracker
named Jack Duane.  Duane is Jurgis's opposite--worldly,
lighthearted, and openly at war with society.  After college, he
had developed a telegraphic device and "been robbed of it by a
great company." 

  NOTE:  THE NATURALIST VIEW OF MARRIAGE Duane tells Jurgis
that "this wasn't a world in which a man had any business with a
family." This motif crops up again and again in The Jungle, as
it does in the novels of Emile Zola, founder of the French
Naturalist school of literature. 

  According to the Naturalists, marriage is a trap that men are
forced into by their sexual urge.  Jurgis once believed this.
In chapter 2 we read, "Jurgis had never expected to get
married--he had laughed at it as a foolish trap for a man to
walk into." 

  It's a trap for Jurgis and other workingmen because the need
to support a family makes the workingman vulnerable to all sorts
of exploitation, another Sinclair theme.  Duane foresees the day
when Jurgis will "give up the fight and shift for himself." 

  Exposition.  Duane regales Jurgis with his adventures and
expands Jurgis's world by introducing him to other
prisoners--animals in this "Noah's ark of the city's crime."
(Like many metaphors, this one falls apart when you examine it
too closely.  The jail, unlike the ark, saves no one, although
some do view it as a brief respite from the outside world.)
Sinclair then switches metaphors, calling the prisoners "the
drainage of the great festering ulcer of society"--an ugly
symptom of an economic system that's based on greed, and a
political system that is corrupt.  Everything in this society is
for sale, including "justice and honor, women's bodies and men's
souls." 

  Notice how frequently Sinclair conjures up the animal world.
In Chicago, "human beings writhed and fought and fell upon each
other like wolves in a pit." The fighting and lusts and
corruption are a "wild-beast tangle." 

  Sinclair defends the prisoners' nonchalant attitude toward
imprisonment.  Being in prison is no disgrace to them:  they
know that "the game had never been fair, the dice were loaded."
Besides, the real criminals are "the swindlers and thieves of
millions of dollars"--the packers and their henchmen. 

  SCENE 2.  Callahan tries Jurgis in court, with Elzbieta and
Kotrina looking on.  Through an interpreter Jurgis tries to give
his side of the story, but the judge does not listen and
sentences him to 30 days in jail plus court costs. 

  Exposition.  Jurgis ends up in another jail, the Bridewell,
and spends 10 days breaking stone--a welcome relief from his
cellmate, a quarrelsome Norwegian sailor. 

  SCENE 3.  Stanislovas visits with the news that Jurgis's
worst fears have materialized.  Ona is sick.  Marija can't
work--her hand is gangrenous from a job injury.  Elzbieta's job
is gone, so she begs for food from the neighbors.  Stanislovas
too has lost his job and must sell newspapers with his two
brothers and Kotrina.  Stunned, Jurgis gives Stanislovas 14
cents--all he has in the world. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 18 

  Released from prison, Jurgis walks the twenty miles back to
Chicago, Compare this trek with the trolley ride that took him
and the family to Packingtown the day after they arrived in
Chicago.  This journey is also leading him to a new life.
However, the satanic symbolism of chapter 2 is gone, and Jurgis
is a different person--weary, less naive, with fewer
illusions. 

  Still, dangers are everywhere.  Unpaved paths are
"treacherous with deep slush holes." Each railroad crossing is
"a death trap for the unwary." In the center of the city, sooty
snow has made the streets "sewers of inky blackness, with horses
slipping and plunging." 

  Jurgis avoids these traps only to discover the jaws of one
snapped shut.  His house has been repainted and sold; his family
has moved back to square one--Aniele Jukniene's lodging house. 

  The history of their suffering rushes through Jurgis's mind.
The house was a reason for their sacrifice, and now it has
become a symbol of that sacrifice. 

  At Aniele's lodging house, Jurgis finds Ona in the throes of
premature childbirth.  She prays for death. 

  Jurgis realizes they have no doctor, no midwife.  "We--we
have no money," Marija whispers.  He collects $1.25 from the
women sitting downstairs and rushes out to find a midwife. 

  NOTE:  MEDICAL CARE FOR THE POOR A recurrent theme of the
novel is the inadequate medical care available to the poor.  Ona
and her friends with "womb trouble" put their faith in patent
medicines of dubious value.  A cure for Kristoforas's lameness
was out of reach for Elzbieta--but not for the "Chicago
billionaire" who hired a "great European surgeon" to cure his
daughter of the same disease.  And now Ona must deal with an
agonizing and dangerous birth with no medical help. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 19 

  In Madame Haupt, the midwife, Sinclair creates one of the
novel's most convincing characters.  Take a few moments to study
the way he approaches her. 

  He begins dropping clues about her in the first sentence.  We
have an idea of her circumstances from the fact that she lives
"over a saloon," at the top of a "dingy flight of steps." 

  When we meet her, she's "frying pork and onions" in a smoky
room and drinking from a "black bottle." Sinclair describes her
as "enormously fat" and dressed in "a filthy blue wrapper"; her
teeth are black.  With this woman as Ona's only hope, we know
that Ona is going to die. 

  And yet, Madame Haupt is a comic figure.  She is a
grotesque--a clown so bizarre and repulsive that she makes us
respond with nervous laughter.  She is pretentious; she refers
to a job as a "case." She is vain; before going out, she adjusts
her black bonnet until it sits just right.  She is also a
glutton and a money-grubber, the very personification of
greed. 

  Still, she has a heart.  Even though Jurgis can't meet her
price, she agrees to go with him because she doesn't like to
think of anyone suffering. 

  After leading Madame Haupt to Aniele's, Jurgis goes to a
saloon, where a generous saloon-keeper gives him food and drink
and a dry stairway to sleep in.  Near dawn, he goes to Aniele's,
where the midwife blames him for not getting a doctor earlier.
She speaks callously to Jurgis.  Ona "will die," she says.  "Der
baby is dead now." 

  Up in the garret, Ona recognizes Jurgis just before she dies.
Kotrina returns home in the morning with three dollars she
earned selling papers.  Jurgis uses the money to get drunk. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 20 

  Elzbieta begs enough money from neighbors for a requiem mass
for Ona.  But they are too poor to bury her, and the city buries
her in potter's field. 

  Elzbieta convinces Jurgis to stay and take care of little
Antanas.  Having been blacklisted, Jurgis can't get a job in
Packingtown--another example of the power of the Beef Trust to
control a worker's life.  Blacklisting, Sinclair says, is "a
warning to the men, and a means of keeping down union agitation
and political discontent." 

  Jurgis lands a job with a farm equipment
manufacturer--another giant factory, this time part of the
Harvester Trust.  The job allows Sinclair to shine his critic's
lamp on another industry, enforcing his point is that it's the
entire economic system, not just the meat-packing industry, that
toys with workers' lives. 

  Jurgis's new job is in a modern, well-designed plant with a
restaurant, a reading room, and spacious workshops.  Yet the men
are paid by the piece, requiring them to work at breakneck speed
to earn a living.  Sinclair explains all about piecework in a
muckraking passage that ends:  "If we are the greatest nation
the sun ever shone upon, it would seem to be mainly because we
have been able to goad our wage-earners to the pitch of a
frenzy." 

  Sinclair muckrakes the trolley companies, too.  This
"street-car monopoly" avoids giving transfers to commuters like
Jurgis, who must ride more than one line to get to work.  Jurgis
chooses, instead, to walk. 

  Jurgis's new job allows him to "pick up heart again and to
make plans." But after nine days his department is closed to
allow the demand for farm equipment to catch up with the
supply. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 21 

  This chapter marks another turning point in Jurgis's life--he
is now released from the family obligations that made it easy
for bosses, politicians, and con men to use him.  Before making
that break complete, however, Sinclair again batters his hero
with another series of psychological, physical, and economic
setbacks. 

  Jurgis is heartbroken at his layoff from the farm equipment
plant, but the experience has taught him something valuable.
There's something wrong when industrialists as "enlightened" as
the managers of the harvester plant can't protect their workers'
jobs.  "It had happened that way before, said the men, and it
would happen that way forever." What Sinclair is suggesting--and
Jurgis doesn't quite understand--is that the boom-bust rhythms
of the capitalist economic system are absurd.  The reward for a
man's "doing his duty too well" during boom periods is "only to
be turned out to starve" during bust periods. 

  Jurgis returns to the streets, "begging for any work." At
night he sleeps in a police station with other homeless men.
For food, he is totally dependent on Elzbieta's children, who
give him a little money every day. 

  Another of Elzbieta's children, the crippled Juozapas, is
responsible for his finding another job.  While poking around
Mike Scully's dump for food, Juozapas meets a settlement worker.
Note Sinclair's sarcastic view of these early social workers:
"rich people who came to live there to find out about the poor
people." This one wears "a long fur snake around her neck" and
cries on Elzbieta's shoulder at the family's tale of woe.  But
through her Jurgis gets a job at a steel mill in South
Chicago. 

  Jurgis is taken on a tour of the plant.  Once more, Sinclair
gives a fascinating description of an industrial process.  Note
the poetic images Sinclair uses:  Cauldrons of molten iron are
"big enough for all the devils of hell to brew their broth in."
"Iron bands" seize "iron prey." A steel rail is made from an
ingot "the size of a man's body." "In the grip of fate," this
"body" is transformed into "a great red snake escaped from
purgatory." The factory seems like a torture chamber in hell.
And it is here, moving rails, that Jurgis ends up. 

  After three weeks on the job, Jurgis one day rushes to aid
fellow workers who have been splattered by molten iron, and
injures his hand.  The reward for his heroism?  He is "laid up
for eight working days without pay." 

  To save transportation costs, Jurgis had been living near the
plant, returning to Aniele's only for Saturday night and Sunday.
With his new job, however, Jurgis can spend long hours with
little Antanas and delight in his growth. 

  With his return to work, he begins "to make plans and dream
dreams" again.  It's a warning:  The last time he allowed
himself that luxury, he lost his job at the harvester plant.
This time, after a heavy rain one day while Jurgis is at work,
Antanas drowns in the flooded street in front of Aniele's
house. 

  Jurgis has hit bottom.  But he has also been liberated (from
the burden of family). 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 22 

  The death of Ona and now of his little son Antanas triggers a
crisis in Jurgis's life.  No more tenderness, no more
tears--signs of weakness that "had sold him into slavery!"
Instead he vows to transform himself--to become a new man by
purging the past from his system.  He's no longer going to think
of others; he's going to be selfish, like every other animal in
the jungle. 

  How does he change?  Out in the country, he waves
"derisively" at a brakeman who swears at him.  He takes a long
bath in a deep stream.  The bath is symbolic:  Jurgis scours his
body and his clothes to wash away the past.  He commits an act
of vandalism against a farmer who is rude to him.  The
act--ripping up more than a hundred newly planted peach
trees--is symbolic, too:  "It showed his mood; from now on he
was fighting, and the man who hit him would get all that he
gave, every time." 

  Now that he is on his own, he is free to refuse work.  When
farmers offer him full-time work, he turns them down. 

  Jurgis's experience as a hobo is no more unique than his
other experiences.  He is part of an army of "surplus
labor"--men and women who migrate from one temporary job to
another.  The women who follow this army are prostitutes, who
have sacrificed youth and beauty and been cast aside like their
used-up male counterparts. 

  However, Jurgis is unsuccessful in crushing the caring, warm
person within him.  His old self triumphs over the heartless new
man that he tried to will himself to be.  Overcome with grief
for his dead son and wife, he hides in the woods like a sick
animal and weeps. 

  Yet there is no going back.  Ona and Antanas are gone.  And
he is a new man, though not the heartless one he wanted to
become. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 23 

  Cold weather ends Jurgis's freedom and sends him back to
Chicago.  He gets a job digging a tunnel for a subway freight
line, part of a scheme by Chicago merchants to break the union
of teamsters who haul goods above ground.  The merchants have
bought off city councilmen to get them to approve the plan.
This is one more example of Sinclair's theme that politicians
and businessmen conspire to keep workers powerless and poor.
The fact that Jurgis is a party to the scheme suggests another
familiar motif.  In their struggle for survival, workers often
unknowingly labor against their best interests. 

  After six weeks Jurgis ends up in the hospital with a job
injury.  After Christmas--the "pleasantest Christmas he had ever
had in America"--he is discharged from the hospital even though
he is destitute and has no place to stay.  In its own way, this
public institution is just as heartless as industry! 

  For warmth, he spends a lot of time in saloons and even
visits a mission one night, suffering through a sermon on "sin
and redemption." Sinclair shows his contempt for preachers:
they are "part of the order established that was crushing men
down and beating them." They try to save souls when what they
should be saving--with jobs, food, and shelter--are bodies.
After the sermon, the homeless are sent out into the snow and
must wait an hour before they can go into the police station for
the night. 

  Jurgis becomes a beggar, though not a successful one.  Some
of the "pros" have "comfortable homes, and families, and
thousands of dollars in the banks," we're told.  Compared to
them, Jurgis is "a blundering amateur." 

  Even as a beggar, the need for warmth keeps him close to
saloons.  People who give him handouts are annoyed to see him
dart inside a saloon.  But, as Sinclair explains, there's no
place else for beggars to go for cheap food or drink and a
feeling of home. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 24 

  This chapter consists of two parts.  The brief section is a
summary of Jurgis's current understanding of the world.  The
second, longer part contains the book's longest dramatized
scene--the story of the one "adventure" of Jurgis's life. 

  Jurgis now sees civilization as "a world in which nothing
counted but brutal might." Wandering about the streets, darting
into bars to keep warm, he feels as though he has "lost in the
fierce battle of greed." In his despair, he believes there is
"no place for him anywhere," and that he is "doomed to be
exterminated." 

  And then something happens that seems at first to contradict
that gloomy diagnosis.  While begging, he meets Freddie Jones,
the 18-year-old son of one of the big meat packers.  Freddie's
parents have gone abroad; he's footloose, drunk, and "a'most
busted"--down to his last $2000!  When he hears that Jurgis has
no place to stay, he invites Jurgis home and gives him a hundred
dollar bill to pay for the cab.  When they reach the mansion,
Freddie orders the butler, Hamilton, to pay the cabbie, so
Jurgis gets to keep the $100. 

  Freddie is delighted, to learn that Jurgis once worked for
Freddie's father.  Misunderstanding relations between management
and labor in Packingtown, Freddie says, "Great fren's with the
men, guv'ner--labor and capital, commun'ty 'f int'rests, an' all
that-" That particular misunderstanding is magnified when
Freddie prices everything in the dining room.  We learn that his
father paid $3000 for each dining room chair--more than an
unskilled worker can earn at Jones & Company in six years! 

  Jurgis devours a meal and drinks a full bottle of champagne
while Freddie looks on in wonder.  He tells Jurgis about his
brother's love affair and his sister's marriage to an Italian
marquis.  Hearing those tales, you can't help but think about
the children in Jurgis's family. 

  When Freddie passes out, Hamilton orders Jurgis to leave.  At
the door, the butler wants to search him, but Jurgis won't allow
it.  He has taken nothing except the $100 bill.  Still, keeping
the money is stealing of a sort--the first Jurgis has ever
done. 

  NOTE:  A PLAY ON NAMES Sinclair makes fun of Admiral George
Dewey, a naval hero of the Spanish-American War, by giving his
name to "a monstrous bulldog," the pet and defender of the
capitalistic Jones family.  This characterization must have
delighted The Jungle's socialist readers in 1905.  The only
beneficiaries of the 1898 war, in their view, were the
businesses that gained new markets and sources of raw materials
from Spain. 

  These readers must have chuckled at the butler's name, too.
This cantankerous servant bears the last name of Alexander
Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury and a strong
backer of business interests. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 25 

  This chapter--divided into four dramatized scenes and three
sections of largely summary narrative--is a kind of how-to on
political chicanery as well as a tour of Chicago's criminal
underworld.  The chapter serves Sinclair's ends as propagandist
and muckraker, because it shows how politics and crime are
inextricably linked to each other and to legitimate business. 

  When Jurgis tries to change the hundred-dollar bill in a
saloon, the bartender shortchanges him and Jurgis attacks him.
A policeman knocks Jurgis senseless and takes him to jail. 

  In court the next day Jurgis tells the truth, but it does him
no good.  The judge sentences him to ten days in the county jail
plus court costs. 

  Jurgis can't fathom the injustice.  But Sinclair explains the
situation to us:  The cop regularly takes graft from the saloon
owner, and the judge is indebted to the bartender, the
Democratic party "henchman" who helped hustle votes to reelect
him. 

  In jail, Jurgis meets Jack Duane once more.  He realizes he
has a lot in common with Duane and the other prisoners, and
after he is released, he joins Duane.  Their first "job"
together is a street mugging during which their victim is badly
hurt; this unsettles Jurgis.  But to Duane, "It's a case of us
or the other fellow," justifying all crime with the law of the
jungle. 

  Soon Duane is introducing Jurgis to the "saloons and
'sporting houses,'" where Chicago's criminal elite hangs out.
From this vantage point, he begins to understand how rotten the
municipal government is.  The city is "owned by an oligarchy of
business men" and is only "nominally ruled by the people." The
business interests pay graft to everyone, from legislators and
lawyers to union leaders and newspaper editors and city
employees.  For a price, the police permit everything illegal,
from Sunday drinking to prostitution. 

  A political regular named Buck Halloran gives Jurgis a
glimpse of the way criminals live off the city.  He pays Jurgis
$5 to pick up city paychecks for a list of imaginary workers.
Then Jurgis learns the definition of "pull," when Halloran has
Jurgis freed from jail after he is arrested for a drunken fight.
Jurgis is grateful--all the more so, because, in his new status,
he doesn't want to stay among "stinking" bums at the police
station.  How quickly the change!  Not long ago, Jurgis was one
of those bums, fighting for a place on the station floor. 

  When Jurgis becomes Mike Scully's man at Durham's, he learns
how easy it is to dupe workers.  Because he fears that the
unpopularity of the Democratic candidate for alderman may cause
voters to switch parties, Scully, the Democratic boss of the
stockyards district, has struck an intricate deal with his
Republican rivals.  If the Republicans promise to run no one
against Scully in next year's race for alderman, Scully will
back this year's Republican choice for the post.  There's one
hitch:  the Republican candidate is to be one of Scully's
friends. 

  NOTE:  JURGIS AND SOCIALISM Jurgis is becoming more aware of
socialism.  The Socialist party has become a factor in Chicago
politics, one Scully hopes to counter by having Jurgis tout the
Republican candidate to his fellow workers in the stockyard.
Scully seems worried that Socialists are said to be
incorruptible--they can't be bought.  Jurgis doesn't care one
way or the other but is willing to accept the popular view that
Socialists are "the enemies of American institutions." 

  Jurgis's work to stem the growth of the Socialist vote
reinforces one of Sinclair's familiar motifs:  Workers are often
ignorant of their own best interests and continually take steps
to defeat them. 

  At Scully's behest Jurgis returns to the stockyards to drum
up support among the workers for the Republican candidate,
Scotty Doyle, who will "represent the workingmen." A letter from
Scully gets Jurgis a job as hog trimmer at Durham's. 

  On election day, Jurgis spends hundreds of dollars buying
votes for Doyle.  He votes six times himself.  When Doyle wins,
Jurgis gets drunk.  Is he again using alcohol to numb his
conscience? 

  The workers celebrate too, believing that the "power of the
common people" has prevailed.  Sarcastically, Sinclair speaks of
"this triumph of popular government." 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 26 

  As the chapter begins, Jurgis is still at Durham's, able to
carouse and yet save a third of his earnings.  As the chapter
ends, he's back on the street, an outcast once more, with only a
few dollars to his name. 

  In this chapter, Sinclair focuses our attention on a
nationwide strike by packing-house workers.  Like the real
strike led by the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen
in 1904, this one fails.  Sinclair explains his theme:  Unionism
is not the answer to the workers' problems, because the packers
have the army of surplus labor as scabs.  They have the
government and its agents in their pockets.  They have a natural
ally in the newspapers that sway public opinion to their side.
And they have the allegiance of opportunists like Jurgis, who
use the strike as a chance to get ahead. 

  Still a naif when it comes to choosing sides, Jurgis at first
walks out with the rest of the men.  He goes to see Scully about
a temporary job, but Scully can't help him.  Jurgis has no
alternative but to become a scab and help the packers break the
strike. 

  NOTE:  THE "NEW 'AMERICAN HEROES'" Sinclair opens the fourth
section of this chapter by describing Jurgis as "one of the new
'American heroes.'" Sinclair's use of the label is ironic, of
course.  The source--a remark by Charles Eliot of Harvard
College--was familiar to Sinclair's readers in 1906.  When a
real butchers' strike had polarized the nation in 1904, Eliot
had come out on the side of the packers and had glorified scabs
as "martyrs" who deserved protection. 

  In his eagerness to prove Eliot wrong, Sinclair may have gone
overboard.  "...the new American hero," he says, "contained an
assortment of the criminals and thugs of the city, besides
Negroes and the lowest foreigners....  They had been attracted
more by the prospect of disorder than by the big wages." 

  Jurgis develops most of the characteristics of scabs that
Sinclair disdains.  He becomes a thug, venturing outside the
yards to beat up strikers.  On one such outing, he joins police
in breaking up a saloon and cleaning out the cash drawer. 

  He becomes a boss on the killing beds for $5 a day and is
told he can keep the job after the strike.  Workers pay him to
look the other way when they commit infractions.  On off hours,
he gambles and drinks. 

  Although he gets "used to being a master of men," he never
completely loses his sense of right and wrong.  He despises
himself for being a scab and takes out his self-hatred on the
men, driving "them until they were ready to drop with
exhaustion." And when he meets Connor again, he tries to kill
him.  But Connor is Jurgis's nemesis--the opponent he cannot
best.  Jurgis gets arrested and tossed into jail. 

  NOTE:  SINCLAIR'S ATTITUDE TOWARD BLACKS Sinclair has been
accused of racism for his portrayal of blacks in this chapter.
Blacks are described as "stupid black Negroes"; as people who do
"not want to work"; as "big buck Negroes with daggers in their
boots"; as "for the first time free [of slavery and its
traditions]...  to gratify every passion; as brawlers; as
practitioners of almost pagan religious rites.  Those are the
stereotypical views of a bigot. 

  What can be said in Sinclair's defense?  Some readers have
said he was too zealous and painted all scabs--including "the
lowest foreigners"--with a dirty brush.  Other readers say that
Sinclair wanted to elaborate on his metaphor of the jungle.
Blacks, whose ancestors were "savages in Africa," suited his
purpose.  He exaggerated these "savage" qualities to emphasize
his theme. 

  Still others say we can't hold Sinclair to blame for his
stereotypical thinking; he was born in Baltimore of southern
parents only thirteen years after the Civil War.  It was not a
time or a place that encouraged a high degree of sensitivity by
whites toward black people and their culture. 

  The counterargument, of course, is that we expect more than
ordinary sensitivity from our intellectuals--especially those
who champion society's outcasts.  By those standards, Sinclair's
blind spot about blacks is inexcusable. 

  Jurgis's frayed political connections can't save him anymore.
"His pull had run up against a bigger pull"--Connor's.  Scully
is even talking about sending Connor to the state legislature.
The best Bush Harper can do for Jurgis is to use Jurgis's
savings to bail him out of jail.  After that, Jurgis must flee,
for any court will sentence him heavily for beating up Connor. 

  But even his pal Harper finds a way to use Jurgis.  Harper
says he's helping Jurgis "for friendship's sake." Actually, he
intends to find a way to keep Jurgis's $300 bail money himself
after Jurgis flees.  Jurgis, "overwhelmed with gratitude and
relief," boards a streetcar for another part of the city. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 27 

  Sinclair has put his naif through an endless number of tests.
Jurgis is now hardened to reality.  His blinders have been
knocked off.  He realizes there's no escaping the harshness of
life in a capitalist democracy--not as a worker, a tramp, or
even a criminal.  People with power use people without power.
And the powerful, too, are used; even Scully is the packers'
puppet. 

  Sinclair is going to make that point again in this chapter,
as he begins to tie up the plot's loose ends.  Jurgis is going
to discover Marija among the used, willingly selling her body to
survive. 

  As the chapter opens, we find Jurgis on the run.  He is once
more a victim, alone, in the Jungle. 

  It's impossible to get a job.  The packers won the strike,
and about half the strikers are back on the job.  Jurgis steals
food, gets some handouts at a soup kitchen, begs some more.  One
night, to stay out of the rain, he ducks into a Republican
rally, where the G.O.P.  candidate for Vice-President is
scheduled to speak. 

  NOTE:  THE USE OF IRONY Notice here the way Sinclair uses
irony to signal his opposition to protective tariffs (import
taxes so high they keep out foreign goods):  The "system of
Protection" is "an ingenious device whereby the workingman
permitted the manufacturer to charge him higher prices, in order
that he might receive higher wages; thus taking his money out of
his pocket with one hand, and putting a part of it back with the
other." 

  Read the entire passage closely to see how Sinclair uses
irony to ridicule the candidate. 

  The speech puts Jurgis to sleep and his snoring gets him
kicked out of the rally.  He starts begging and, by chance, runs
into Alena Jasaityte, the "belle of the wedding feast." She
gives him Marija's address. 

  Jurgis goes there, discovers that Marija is a prostitute, and
gets caught with her in a police raid.  While she dresses to go
to the police station, Marija gives Jurgis news about the
family.  Stanislovas got locked in a room at work and was eaten
by rats.  Elzbieta has a job, but Marija's earnings are needed
to help take care of the children.  A work accident cost
Tamoszius a finger, and no longer able to play the violin, he
left Chicago. 

  What most shocks Jurgis is Marija; "...she was so quiet--so
hard!  It struck fear to his heart to watch her." Here is the
woman who began the book defending "the best home traditions."
Now she sees things "from the business point of view." "When
people are starving," she explains, "and they have anything with
a price, they ought to sell it." 

  Recalling what happened to his beloved Ona, Jurgis knows he
can't share that point of view.  He doesn't tell Marija that he
just gave up a foreman's job and $300 "for the satisfaction of
knocking down Phil Connor a second time." 

  In a station-house cell a surge of forgotten emotions causes
Jurgis to ponder what has happened to him and his family.
"Memories of the old life--his old hopes and his old yearnings,
his old dreams of decency and independence!" flash before him,
though he has tried to put this all behind. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 28 

  In the morning a judge frees Jurgis and the other men picked
up in the raid.  Back at the brothel, Marija tells Jurgis she is
addicted to morphine.  She also explains how prostitutes are
exploited by their bosses:  "...they let them run up debts, so
they can't get away." 

  Jurgis leaves with Elzbieta's new address--a tenement in the
ghetto district, a slum far from Packingtown--but he doesn't go
there.  Instead, he goes into the same hall he had been in the
night before.  A political rally, for the Socialists this time,
takes up the rest of the chapter. 

  Jurgis sleeps through a good part of the rally.  Finally, a
well-dressed young woman nudges him and urges him to listen.
The speech itself is wordy, florid, incendiary, but the speaker
is electrifying and has the knack of making Jurgis feel as if he
has been singled out.  We can assume that the emotionalism of
the appeal and the cheers of 2000 already-converted Socialists
also affect Jurgis. 

  But it's the message, not the delivery of it, that wins him
over.  He believes the message because it describes his
experiences exactly.  And it explains that experience as a
universal condition that workers can reverse.  Jurgis is that
man "whom pain and suffering have made desperate....  And to him
my words will come like a sudden flash of lightning...
revealing the way...  [and] solving all problems....  The scales
will fall from his eyes,...  [and] he will leap up with a cry of
thankfulness, a free man at last!  A man delivered from his
self-created slavery!" You put yourself into this trap, he tells
Jurgis, but you can get yourself out. 

  The speech is also a recapitulation of the novel's major
themes.  Under capitalism, "...all the fair and noble impulses
of humanity,...  are shackled and bound in the service of
organized and predatory Greed!" In Chicago, "women are...
driven by hunger to sell their bodies to live." "Homeless and
wretched" men, "willing to work and begging for a chance," are
"starving." Children are "wearing out their strength and
blasting their lives in the effort to earn their bread!" Mothers
struggle "to earn enough to feed their little ones!" Old people,
"cast off and helpless," await death. 

  Living off these oppressed people are "the masters of these
slaves, who own their toil....  They live in palaces, they riot
in luxury and extravagance....  The whole of society is in their
grip, the whole labor of the world lies at their mercy." 

  What electrifies Jurgis and the others is the glimpse of the
future the orator presents.  He envisions the oppressed as a
mighty giant rising against the oppressors.  The audience is
that giant in miniature.  It comes "to its feet with a yell;...
And Jurgis is with them,...  shouting to tear his throat." He
sees that he has made peace with his fate, that he had "ceased
to hope and to struggle." But no more.  The orator has pointed
him toward a new goal.  Jurgis's whispered "By God!  By God!  By
God!  at the end of the chapter emphasizes his determination to
reach that goal. 

  NOTE:  THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR During the 1904 presidential
election campaign, a war between Russia and Japan was front-page
news.  The two nations were fighting for control of Manchuria, a
region of northeast China.  Japan stunned the world by whipping
the Russians in spectacular land and sea battles.  The orator
compares the horrors of war to the sufferings and death that
result from the struggle in Chicago between "wage-slaves" and
their "masters." 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 29 

  Jurgis's education about socialism--and, Sinclair hoped, his
readers' education--begins with this chapter.  After the speech,
the orator puts Jurgis in touch with Comrade Ostrinski, a Polish
tailor who had been jailed in Europe for his politics.
Ostrinski takes Jurgis to his apartment, where with his family
he ekes out a living as a pants finisher. 

  Ostrinski's crash course to educate Jurgis begins with an
explanation of the competitive wage system.  Workers have only
their labor to sell, and jobs go to the lowest bidders.  So
workers are forced by this system to accept wages that they can
barely live on.  Two great classes are forming:  the capitalist
class "with its enormous fortunes" and the
proletariat--industrial workers "bound into slavery by unseen
chains." 

  The proletariat is the larger group, but it lacks
organization and class consciousness.  With effort and patience,
that organization will come about and in the socialist scheme
the workers will then use the vote to take over the government
and end private ownership of industry. 

  Jurgis applies these concepts to the Beef Trust before he
beds down for the night on the floor of Ostrinski's kitchen.
Now he can begin to understand how the packers used him.  He has
trouble getting to sleep.  He can't get out of his mind a
"joyful vision of the people of Packingtown marching in and
taking possession of the Union Stockyards!" 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 30 

  Jurgis's political education continues after he lands a job
as porter at a hotel owned by a Socialist named Tommy Hinds.
Hinds has a cure for every problem, large or small:  "Vote the
Socialist ticket!" 

  His hotel is a "very hot-bed of propaganda." Everyone who
works there is a Socialist, and the party line is pushed on all
the guests--even on the Western cattlemen who stay there. 

  Jurgis, now living with Elzbieta and her children, becomes an
avid reader of tracts and newspapers.  He also attends political
meetings regularly, where sometimes he hears "speakers of
national prominence." 

  NOTE:  SOCIALISTS OF "NATIONAL PROMINENCE" Readers in 1906
would have recognized some of the speakers Sinclair describes
but doesn't name.  Jack London, the "young author," traveled the
world and became famous for The Call of the Wild (1903), The Sea
Wolf (1904), and White Fang (1905).  The "millionaire Socialist"
whose magazine had been "driven to Canada" is Gaylord
Wilshire--like London, one of Sinclair's friends; he made his
fortune selling billboard advertisements.  Sinclair even put
himself in this chapter as the author of a manifesto that urged
socialism on the Chicago unionists who lost the packing-house
strike in 1904. 

  The Appeal to Reason is the Socialist weekly that serialized
The Jungle before it appeared in book form.  Sinclair's detailed
description of its contents reads like a promotion letter, Which
he probably meant it to be.  But the description also shows
something Sinclair was at pains to point out--that socialists
have a sense of humor. 

  It is obvious now that Jurgis has thrown off his timidity
with his chains.  He speaks up at a Democratic rally to say that
both major parties buy votes.  He'd go on, but two friends make
him sit down.  This is a far cry from the Jurgis we used to
know. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  CHAPTER 31 

  The chapter opens with a visit to Marija, whom Jurgis fails
to convince to quit prostitution, and ends with a rousing speech
at a Socialist gathering, a rather haphazard and unsatisfying
way to end a novel.  Sinclair knew it; in 1909 he called the
ending "pitifully inadequate." Later, in his Autobiography, he
explained:  "The last chapters were not up to standard, because
both my health and my money were gone, and a second trip to
Chicago, which I had hoped to make, was out of the question." 

  Excuses aside, probably no other ending would have satisfied
Sinclair's urge to propagandize for socialism in 1905.  At
heart, he was a pamphleteer. 

  NOTE:  PAMPHLETEERING Pamphleteering--writing short,
paperbound books to promote a point of view in a political or
religious controversy--has a long and noble history.  John
Milton, the English poet, wrote several books on divorce, church
government, and press freedom.  In the 1770s, pamphlets by
Thomas Paine presented convincing arguments for American
independence.  A pamphlet was relatively inexpensive and easy to
print and often escaped the eyes of government censors.  Thus,
it was the ideal medium for a writer with a controversial point
of view. 

  Today, we attach the label pamphleteer to writers who promote
their ideas with the singlemindedness of the early pamphlet
writers.  Sinclair is one such writer.  In the last chapter, he
all but discards his other hats (storyteller, historian, and
muckraker) to promote socialism. 

  The conversation that is at the center of the chapter takes
place at the home of a wealthy young social worker.  The
occasion is a visit from a magazine editor who wants to learn
about socialism.  The other guests include Jurgis, a
"philosophical anarchist" named Nicholas Schliemann, and a
Christian socialist named Lucas. 

  Schliemann and Lucas represent opposite poles of the party.
They agree on only two points:  1.  Everything needed to produce
food, clothing, and shelter--"the necessities of life"--should
be publicly owned and managed in a democratic manner.  2.  That
goal will be achieved only if wage earners are taught to view
themselves as a distinct class and to act together
politically. 

  Like the American writer Henry David Thoreau, Schliemann is a
rarity:  a person who lives his life as an experiment.  He lives
alone ("No sane man would allow himself to fall in love until
after the revolution," he says) on $125 a year, which he earns
as a migrant farm laborer each summer. 

  Once an itinerant evangelist, Lucas grafted socialism to his
religious beliefs and now travels "all over the country, living
like the apostles of old, upon hospitality, and preaching upon
street corners." To him, socialism is an updated version of the
teachings of Jesus--"the world's first revolutionist, the true
founder of the Socialist movement; a man whose whole being was
one flame of hatred for wealth." Schliemann disagrees.  To him,
socialism is "a necessary step toward a far-distant goal"--an
anarchistic society which encourages "the free development of
every personality, unrestricted by laws." Schliemann sees
religion as a weapon of oppression that "poisoned the stream of
progress at its source." He envisions a socialist paradise.  The
competitive wage system would be gone, and so would war and its
costs.  Profits would be gone; goods would be sold at a price
equal to the cost of the labor required to make them.  Also gone
would be the costly wastes of competition:  industrial warfare,
vice, an expensive legal system, political corruption, the
purchase and production of frivolous items, the idle rich.
(Everyone would be required to work.) In their place would rise
"positive economies of co-operation":  shared housekeeping and
cooperative cooking, scientific farming, labor-saving machinery.
In such a world, Schliemann promises, "anyone would be able to
support himself by an hour's work a day." 

  The novel ends the next day as the Socialists tally up
election returns in a meeting hall.  The numbers Sinclair gives
are accurate; they reflect the unexpectedly strong showing for
the Socialist candidate for president, Eugene V.  Debs, in 1904.
In the three wards of Packingtown, 6300 men (women couldn't vote
in presidential elections then) backed the Socialist ticket.  No
wonder Boss Scully had been worried during the aldermanic
elections! 

  Jurgis is in the hall listening to party officials announce
the returns.  A speaker who seems to Jurgis "the very spirit of
the revolution" exhorts the crowd to organize and build on the
party's gains.  With "outraged workingmen" on their side, says
the orator, "Chicago will be ours!" (The speech is based on one
Sinclair made on election night in 1904.) 

  It's a curious ending.  It holds out hope for future
change--but no certainties.  And it allows Jurgis to slip out of
sight, to become just an anonymous part of the cheering crowd in
the hall. 

  Perhaps that's intentional.  It's an axiom of socialism that
individuals get their strength as part of the mass.
Nonetheless, we want to know more about Jurgis at this point,
because we're left with an unfinished portrait of him.  He's
unhappy living with Elzbieta.  She is ill and her boys have
picked up some rough habits on the streets.  Yet he can always
turn from his problems to the Socialist movement--"this great
stream"--and to learning.  "He was just a hotel porter,"
Sinclair tells us, "and expected to remain one while he lived;
but meantime, in the realm of thought, his life was a perpetual
adventure." 

  By becoming ordinary, our hero becomes something less than a
hero.  But he has survived.  For a wage-slave in Packingtown,
that's nothing short of miraculous. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  GLOSSARY 

  ADULTERATE To make something--food, cement, drugs,
water--impure by adding inferior elements.  The meat packers in
The Jungle shortchanged their customers by adding potato flour
to their sausages. 

  ANARCHIST Someone like the character Nicholas Schliemann
(Chapter 31), who believes that full social and political
liberty depends on abolition of governmental restraints.
Socialism, in Schliemann's view, was a means to that end. 

  CAPITALISM An economic system based on private ownership of
the means of production, and a market economy regulated largely
by the supply of goods and services and the demand for them.  In
Sinclair's day, capitalism was closer to the pure form,
laissez-faire, which rejected a government role in the economy
as interference. 

  CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS The perception by wage earners that they
belong to a class (the proletariat) with common grievances and
goals.  According to socialists, this perception is a
prerequisite to political organization and revolution. 

  COMPETITIVE WAGE SYSTEM A system of compensation in which
workers compete with one another to "sell" their labor.  The
system ensures that unskilled jobs will usually go to those
workers willing to accept the lowest wages. 

  CORRUPTION The act of making someone dishonest or disloyal,
usually through bribery. 

  DARWINISM The theory of Charles Darwin (1809-82), the English
naturalist, that holds that all species continually struggle to
survive.  The species with the best chance, he felt, are those
most able to adapt to their environments.  Species that are the
least fit fail to reproduce, and die out.  Sinclair believed in
Darwin's theory and continually alludes to it in The Jungle to
describe his characters' struggles.  (See especially Chapter
7.) 

  EVANGELIST A Christian preacher--often a wandering or
irregular one--who tries to pass on the teachings of Jesus,
which appear mainly in the first four books of the New
Testament, called the gospels, or evangels.  Lucas, the
Christian socialist in Chapter 31, had at one time been an
itinerant evangelist. 

  GRAFT Dishonest gain, especially through abuse of one's
position in business or government. 

  MUCKRAKERS The name President Theodore Roosevelt gave writers
who attacked corrupt politicians and business practices during
the first decade of this century.  Among the leading muckrakers
were Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, and Upton Sinclair.  Their
works helped raise public support for reform. 

  OLIGARCHY A system of government in which a privileged
minority without popular support holds the reins of power. 

  PLUTOCRACY Rule of the wealthy, or the wealthy ruling class
itself. 

  PROLETARIAT The working class, made up mainly of people who
have nothing to sell except their labor.  In ancient Rome the
word referred to the class of people without property.  The
socialist philosopher Karl Marx popularized the term in The
Communist Manifesto in 1848. 

  SETTLEMENT WORKER An early social worker who lived among
immigrants and other poor people in urban slums.  One of the
first settlement workers was Jane Addams (1860-1935), who in
1889 co-founded a social settlement called Hull House in
Chicago.  Sinclair tried to convert her to socialism when he
visited Chicago to research The Jungle. 

  SOCIALISM A body of ideas that blames many of society's ills
on competition for profit.  Socialists want to substitute
cooperation for competition.  They want the government to
control the enterprises that produce goods and services and to
direct those enterprises toward socially responsible projects,
not just profitable ones.  Democratic socialists, such as
Sinclair, believe that voters in free elections should decide
the extent of the government's role in the economy. 

  TRUST A corporation or group of corporations that dominates
an industry, squeezing out competition and keeping prices high.
The Sherman Act of 1890 outlawed trusts, but they continued to
exist well into the 20th century. 

  WAGE SLAVES Wage earners who are bound to their work by
"unseen chains" (i.e., their desperation).  The competitive wage
system kept them in poverty and enabled their employers to
exploit them.  The Jungle is largely an expose, of the way these
"working poor" were treated during the early years of this
century. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  JURGIS' CONVERSION 

  The conversion of Jurgis to socialism, at the end of the
book, was really impossible after his soul had been "murdered,"
as one was told, and the story of his life was quite unreal
when, after the death of his wife and his child, he became a
hobo, a scab, and a crook.  He was as unreal, in fact, as his
friend Duane, the fancy man, or the young millionaire who
invites him to his house in Chicago, a figure of pure melodrama
in which Sinclair reverted to his early pulp-writing.
Sinclair's characters, as a rule, were puppets. 

  -Van Wyck Brooks, The Confident Years, 1953. 

  Jurgis does not have enough inner life to make his final
conversion credible.  Even in its powerful early chapters, the
book demands a surprisingly narrow range of emotion from the
reader.  The more the characters are trapped by the system, they
are transformed from agents to mere victims, and the principal
feeling asked of us is pity--one of the most dehumanizing of all
emotions, since it turns people into objects of our compassion
rather than subjects in their own right. 

  This somewhat stunted humanity prevents The Jungle from being
one of the truly great novels of city life, however accurate its
social and economic framework may be. 

  -Morris Dickstein, "Introduction," to The Jungle, 1981. 

  The "conversion" pattern of The Jungle has been attacked as
permitting too easy a dramatic solution; however...  it should
be noted that in The Jungle Sinclair carefully prepares such an
outcome by conducting Jurgis through all the circles of the
workers' inferno and by attempting to show that no other savior
except Socialism exists.  Perhaps a more valid objection to the
book is Sinclair's failure to realize his characters as "living"
persons....  They gradually lose their individuality....  Yet
paradoxically, the force and passion of the book are such that
they finally do come to stand for the masses themselves, for all
the faceless ones to whom things are done.  Hardly individuals,
they nevertheless collectively achieve symbolic status. 

  -Walter B.  Rideout, The Radical Novel 

  in the United States, 1900-1954, 1956. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  THE USE OF PROPAGANDA 

  The question is...  whether the agitprop [agitation and
propaganda for socialism] in The Jungle damaged this novel as
form and as narrative, and the answer must be affirmative.  The
declamatory final chapter...  is uplifting but it is also
artificial, an arbitrary re-channelling of the narrative flow, a
piece of rhetoric instead of a logical continuation of the
story, and throughout most of the book the woes piled upon
Jurgis and his family are so concentrated as to assault the
imagination.  However, this damage is too slight to spoil the
complete effect.  The Jungle, with an argument now out of date,
remains one of the most heartrending accounts in fiction of what
ignorant and helpless human beings have endured. 

  -Grant C.  Knight, The Strenuous Age 

  in American Literature, 1954. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  A STUDY OF ECONOMICS 

  There are two general approaches which Sinclair makes in all
[his] novels.  One is a close, documented study of the working
of some specific economic mechanism; the other is a charge of
general conspiracy for the maintenance and extension of
privilege on the part of the beneficiaries of the system.  The
Jungle is relatively successful because it leans heavily on the
former technique, though the charge of conspiracy is implicit
throughout. 

  -George J.Becker, "Upton Sinclair: 

  Quixote in a Flivver," College English 21, 1959. 

^^^^^^^^^^
THE JUNGLE:  SINCLAIR'S VISION 

  "Nothing about [Sinclair] has done more to make him an
arresting novelist than his conviction that mankind has not yet
reached its peak, as the pessimists think; and that the current
stage of civilization, with all that is unendurable about it,
need last no longer than till the moment when mankind determines
that it need no longer endure.  He speaks as a Socialist who has
dug up a multitude of economic facts and can present them with
appalling force; he speaks as a poet sustained by visions and
generous hopes. 

  -Carl Van Doren, 

  Contemporary American Novelists, 1900-1920, 1922. 

  THE END