The Jungle Sinclair

In While the works of Upton Sinclair are not widely read today because of their primacy of social change rather than aesthetic pleasure, works like The Jungle are important to understand in relation to the society that produced them. Sinclair was considered a part of the muckraking era, an era when social critics observed all that was wrong and corrupt in business and politics and responded against it. The Jungle was written primarily as a harsh indictment of wage slavery, but its vivid depictions of the deplorable lack of sanitation involved in the meat-packing industry in Chicago resulted in public outrage to the point where Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.

The Jungle is a product of the era when industry was rapidly evolving and millions of immigrants came to America, the perceived land of milk and honey. What they often found instead were a lack of jobs, low paying jobs in deplorable conditions and the realization that the American dream was not equally accessible to all. In the novel Sinclair denounces in brutal prose the deplorable conditions of the Chicago stockyard where the men and women workers are diminished to a level lower than the dumb beasts they must slaughter in the fields. Many immigrants were forced to accept such conditions and low wages because they did not have other options. Jurgis wrestles with this dilemma when he thinks of turning down a job in the lowest of all occupations

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mimics nature than goes against it. The question, nonetheless remains, what is Sinclair getting at? Is he upset with the system or nature itself? The viewpoint expounded in this novel is conducted strictly through the eyes of the oppressed. Writers like Sinclair act like they speak for those without a voice, because they have sacrificed the chance to make money to write about these people. Sinclair and his peers are the muckrakers who gather up the dirt on those who own the means of production, acting like these people should know better than to treat people inhumanely. Yet, often, nature does not treat people humanely. Out in the actual jungle, a human being would be as liable as a squirrel to get eaten. Yet Sinclair with all his socialistic, "I know the way the world should be" mentality delivers a message that admittedly helped to gain better conditions for workers. But it seems a contradiction to portray an immigrant like Rudkus as a symbol of all the problems of society. Rudkus had a choice. In his native country, he knew a life where people would guarantee that his life would continue without starvation or absolute poverty. Yet he chooses, of his own volition, to leave this security for a world he had read abo

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