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Through thorough reading, Sinclair shows the many travesties our country faced,
presenting how the capitalist were discriminating towards the working class. He displays how
women, especially, were segregated. There were many movements such as strikes to change this
capitalist way of living. Sinclair helps reveal the vial acts that were partaking not only in the
factories but with the animals as well. He writes in a demeanor that gets your utmost attention
towards issues that were, for so long, looked the other way. One not only feels the impact he tries
to convey but also shows the ruthless attitudes toward the working class, and the lack of concern
the upper class had towards them. With descriptive incident’s, Sinclair not only helps reveal the
harshness of this time, but tries to show the solution to this corrupt era by glorifying his political
stand point, Socialism.
One of our main problems that our country faced was the sanitation in meat packing
factories, which led many people to death and diseases. Meat inspection was poorly performed
and the buyers never cared about how the animals were treated or fed. “… They would stop to
inspect a bunch of cattle, and there would be a parley, brief and businesslike. The buyer would
nod or drop his whip, and that would mean a bargain; and he would note it in his little book,
along with hundreds of others he had made that morning.”(Sinclair, The Jungle, 3.) The saddest
part of it all is that it shows how poorly inspection was performed, for example Sinclair describes
a horrific death that a main character experiences just by eating smoked sausage. “At any rate, an
hour after eating it, the child had begun to cry with pain, and in another hour he was rolling
about on the floor in convulsions.” (Sinclair, The Jungle, 3.) During this era no one wanted to do
what their jobs required them to do especially for so little pay. Some people could not handle the
severity of what the job entailed, for example killing hogs to be packed, but it was money that
would put food on the table for themselves and their families. “It was too much for some of the
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visitors—the men would look at each other, laughing nervously, and the women would stand
with hands clenched, and the blood rushing to their faces, and the tears starting in their eyes.”
(Sinclair, The Jungle, 7) Sinclair uses metaphors to portray his thoughts of hogs compared to the
working class, “they were so very human in their protests—and so perfectly within their rights!
… They had done nothing to deserve it; and it was adding insult to injury, as the thing was done
here, swinging them up in this cold-blooded, impersonal way, without a pretense of apology,
without the homage of a tear.” (Sinclair, The Jungle) The capitalist J.P. Morgan, Rockefeller,
Carnegie, to the name the few didn’t care how they treated the working class; to them they were
equivalent to the hogs they slaughtered.
The main character that Sinclair uses throughout the story is Jurgis a man who brings his
fiancé and a few relatives from Lithuania to Chicago, striving to fulfill the American dream, was
