Class Struggle In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

Just as the meatpacking industry utilizes every part of the slaughtered animals, the businesses also consume every useable part of the packer town employee through dictated long hours and dangerous work conditions. Upton Sinclair uses the theme of class struggle in The Jungle to illustrate the how the capitalistic economic system in America is a no win proposition for the workingman. The workers are portrayed as pawns in society to make the most money possible for the meat packing industry. Sinclair’s use of the metaphoric comparison of society to the jungle is threaded throughout the book. This naturalism is a hierarchal order of predators in the jungle who prey on the weaker animals, which in this case are the workers whose lives in deplorable …show more content…
Finally, the novel is often singled out as a classic example of American literary naturalism”(Moghtader 13). The theme of struggle is set very early in The Jungle with the introduction of Jurgis and his
Lithuanian family that has emigrated from Europe and faces an obstacle that many immigrants encounter during their assimilation to a new country and that was the language barrier. …show more content…
The path of crime does not require the yet acquired cultural understanding to succeed. “Whereas a culturally illiterate Jurgis demonstrates his competence to think and act within the culture of what the narrator calls “the high-class criminal world of Chicago”(Moghtader 20). This hopeless feeling that has driven Jurgis to a life of crime is amplified in Sinclair’s use of the socialist orator who states that the only way to overcome capitalism is “by the painful groping of the untutored mind, by the feeble stammering of the uncultured voice”( 365). Sinclair is basically stating that the lower class has to scrape together whatever they can and rely on begging, borrowing, or stealing because there is no one there looking out for their