Who Is Upton Sinclair's The Jungle?

Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle is a book filled with hope, heartbreak, poverty, and manipulation. It was an awakening to Americans all over to the adversity that the lower-class had to go through. It depicts the corruption and crime on the streets and in large food companies. This novel follows a man named Jurgis Rudkus as he and his wife Ona travel to America with their relatives during the Gilded Age. Upton Sinclair wrote this in attempt to push socialism, but instead enlightened the readers to what was going on in the places they get their food from.
In Sinclair’s novel, most of the working men are getting things done in dishonest ways, but feel no shame in doing so. They will lie, steal, deceive, and hurt people just so that they get what …show more content…
The people living there act like animals and it’s very obvious who the “king of the jungle” is. It’s the people running the meat packaging companies. They control everything. They decide when the workers get to work and when they get to leave. They decide how they get their paychecks and how they are spending their money they get from it. If you do something to one of them that they don’t like, they will make sure you can not get a job anywhere else, leaving you with no money which will ultimately lead to death. These employees are just the small animals in the jungle who get eaten and forgotten. Survival of the fittest plays a huge role in the humans in this novel as it does with creatures living in the jungle. Upton Sinclair added in numerous metaphors throughout the book that link back to Chicago being a jungle because of capitalism. In the novel, Jurgis bites off a man’s cheek as if he were an actual animal in the wild. There is also a chapter that talks about how the money in Marija’s pockets sunk her in the mud, meaning that the weight of money can make you feel stuck. The novel’s title symbolizes the competitive nature of capitalism. It’s kill or be killed, and the higher class always came out