Jungle
Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel The Jungle is perhaps best known for its historical and journalistic contributions, because the book opened the public's eyes to the horrors of the American meatpacking industry, and particularly its appalling health and safety standards. However, Sinclair's novel also represents an aesthetic and ideological advancement that is often overlooked in favor of the book's somewhat more dramatic accounts of life inside a slaughterhouse and meatpacking plant. In the novel, Jurgis Rudkus travels from naive belief in an American dream to jaded yet-hopeful acceptance of the possibility offered by socialist agitation, and his entire journey is relayed in a kind of naturalistic language that seeks to uncover the larger structures of power and oppression that instigate the specific injustices of the novel. By examining Rudkus' journey in the context of an aesthetic movement designed to capture, as clearly as possible, the objective, naturalistic reality behind experience, one can see how the same attention to detail that makes The Jungle such an important work of muckraking journalism also makes it an artistic and ideological advancement.
The first true hint that Jurgis' experience in America is not going to be what he expected comes near the end of the second chapter, when he and his wife are looking over their new home, and it is the novel's particular narrative style that makes these hints so effective. Sinclair's style is that particular kind of naturalism that arose at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, in that he focuses on describing the naturalistic details of the scene without going into such extreme detail that the narration strays into aestheticism. Instead, he connects these naturalistic details to larger cultural factors in order to make a particular ideological statement while couching it in terms of objective description. While Sinclair's goal is quite clearly agitation and "the crushing defeat of […]...
Jungle" by Upton Sinclair The Jungle written by Upton Sinclair was written in 1901, it talks about corruption in America, Chicago around the twentieth century. The book includes graphic, images of the meat processing which are helpful to the reader for clear understanding. The writer wrote the book with a purpose of showing industrial capitalism, where immigrants worked, the physical conditions, their struggles and how their families lived. The writer
For example, the Lithuanian delicatessen vender, Jokubas Szedvilas, begins by owning his own means of selling foodstuffs in a more healthful and independent fashion that the mechanisms of production destroy, in contrast to what Sinclair calls the "metaphors of human destiny," in the form of the miles of cattle to be put in chutes and killed. (Chapter 3) Later, a young couple, Jurgis and Ona, recall they "had always been
Jungle Updated Sinclair's novel, The Jungle, is a worthwhile piece of literature that can contribute to the understanding of human development within the last century. It is a story of an immigrant family who experiences incredibly difficult and trying hardships in early 20th-century America. The purpose of this essay is to contrast the author's thesis of the story with my own personal interpretation of this novel. It is my understanding that
Sinclair's The Jungle Upton Sinclair's describes the struggles of immigrant life in his novel The Jungle. The book opens with a wedding scene between Jurgis Rudkus and Ona Lukoszaite, a young couple from Lithuania. They celebrate with their extended family in the backroom of a saloon in the Packingtown district of Chicago, the new home of this collection of Lithuanian immigrants. The story then switches to the arduous journey the Lithuanian
He can take a women and use her body for his own pleasure and make threats against her family to get even more from her. It makes me wonder how he can look at himself and not see the filthy creature he is. Three: I must have done something awful to end up in a situation like this. Here we are, all out of jobs. There is no way to
" Steinbeck's novel was written in a much different style, much more modern, and so it is easier for modern readers to relate to it. Each of the novels places the characters in poor situations, so they all compare to each other in this regard. The reader becomes sympathetic to them because of their plight, and they want them to win. Unfortunately, because of society at the time, for most
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