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The Jungle Essay

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The Jungle Essay
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is a truly astonishing piece of literature. It's no doubt that this book is certainly the most eye-opening from all of Sinclair's works, simply because of the enormous impact it had on the meatpacking industry. Sinclair mainly focused on his point of how meat was very poorly packaged and prepared in factories, versus stating the overall importance of living a socialistic, collective society. The book is set in the early 1900s in Chicago. Many people from various countries in Europe had heard from other people that America was a great place to start a new life, that it was easy to find work and get rich fast. The protagonist of this book, Jurgis, is overly jubilant from hearing this information and decides to move over to America with his family to find work and get significantly wealthy. When he comes to America, he is purely ecstatic with his new work conditions, even though they're extremely poor. He refuses to join a union because he believes he's making a decent living for his family, but he is later proven wrong. What does the title of this book mean, exactly? Is it relevant to the actual contents? Why, of course it is. In fact, The Jungle couldn't be any better of a title for this piece of literature, simply because Jurgis and his family are torn apart (not literally) by politicians, dirty employers, lawyers, con-men, and utterly repulsive living conditions. Jurgis starts to realize shortly in the book that after living in America for a short time, its conditions were not what he expected in the slightest. He is conned more often than he isn't, and seeing his family suffer brings him down physically and emotionally, making his entire ordeal even more lamentable. After getting absolutely tired of suffering and getting conned time after time, Jurgis decided to make a change by studying politics and English; however, Jurgis was too late in doing this, for most of his family either died off or ran away by this point. Then, by being
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