Someone may think that it is more pleasant and comfortable to read some romantic stories, adventure books or detective stories which only entertain the reader and do not trouble him with such inconvenient and burning questions as social injustice, abuse of power and greed of the ruling top and mistreatment of poor people. If you are just one of such readers then The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is not a book I would advise you to read. Being written in the nineteenth century The Jungle still remains topical dealing with the burning social, political and moral issues of human society of all times.
The Jungle by Upton Sinclair tells us about the life of immigrant workers in Chicago’s meat packing enterprise in Packingtown in the early 1900s. The novel was first published in 1904 in the socialist newspaper Appeal to Reason but it was considered too realistic and shocking for the wide audience that is why the book had not been published in a full volume until 1906. The main hero and protagonist of the story is Jurgis Rudkus, a Lithuanian immigrant. Together with his big family he comes to America to work in the meatpacking plants in Chicago. This is the story of terrible sufferings which the characters have to go through in this cursed place: unbearable working and living conditions, scarce wages, various humiliations. However, having gone through such hardship Jurgis manages to maintain his human dignity and is reborn under the influence of socialist ideas.
The wedding of Jurgis and Ona Rudkus is the opening scene of the novel. According to Lithuanian traditions everyone in the slums of Packingtown is invited to the wedding. The guests are usually supposed to pay tribute to the “just married” but most of them do not due to low wages, and Jurgis and Ona start their family life deeply in debt. Not knowing American language they are easily scammed by several agents and thieves. The city is a polluted slum which reeks of garbage and is filled with flies. The wages at the plants are extremely low, just a few cents per hour and the work is backbreaking with high injury risk. In spite of these difficulties Jurgis does not lose heart. He knows that his duty is to provide his young family with bread and butter defend and support them. Every time when the trouble happens he would say, “Leave it to me; leave it to me. I will earn more money- I will work harder” (Sinclair, 24). These words are Jurgis’s motto and they would always calm Ona down as she knows that she has a “husband who could solve all the problems” (Sinclair, 21). But the problem is that Jurgis does not realize the real tragic state of people like him and his family. His faith into “American Dream” quickly vanishes, “A very few days of practical experience in this land of high wages had been sufficient to make clear to them the cruel fact that it was …