s of his audience. At times, the book reminds one of those late-night TV solicitations for funds for third-world children. What is interesting is that this is not particularly a good novel to read; the writing is dogmatic and often polemical. Rather than trying to convince with reason and subtlety, Sinclair is shoving a point of view down the throats of those watching. Still, this brutal approach is the only way to make an impression on an audience so far removed from the reality depicted in the novel. Such an approach draws on the Catholic/Jewish/universal guilt that is plied by Sinclair like a preacher through the meat market of industrial life. Rudkus comes into the novel full of hope and the reader must identify with his hopes and dreams. Yet these dreams are not exactly fodder for a successful novel, if Rudkus was to find his American Dream. The dream he finds is as rotten as the sausage that he processes, as is the American Dream in the socialist mindset of Sinclair.
It is ironic that Sinclair uses the stories of people being abused by the system as the focus of his propagandistic writing. Throughout the novel it is obvious that Rudkus will be destroyed, and that his family’s traditional values will be negated by a system that does not care. It is the slow and planned destruction of his life, as a rural citizen of Lithuania who comes from a working class life where the social structure took care of all the residents, due to a code of life, that brings up a question. Is this destruction the fault of industrialization, which is destroying the people who work within its companies? Or are the needs
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