304 Reconstructing, Reimagining: 1865–1900ugly, black as night”; “it might have come from the center of the world, this smoke”;
in fact, it comes from the slaughterhouses. Worst of all, there is a sound as elemental
as the odor blanketing Packingtown, “a sound made up of ten thousand little
sounds.” “It was only by an effort that one could realize it was made by animals,”
the reader is told, “that it was the distant lowing of ten thousand cattle, the distant
grunting of ten thousand swine” being prepared for or experiencing the process
of slaughter.
Lodged in Packingtown, in one of the tenement houses, Jurgis and his
companions soon discover that America is a land of high prices as well as high
wages. Here, “the poor man,” he reflects, “was almost as poor as in any other
corner of the earth.” Each corner of the stockyards is “a separate little inferno.”
And, instead of the land of plenty he had anticipated, Jurgis encounters an
economic jungle. “Here in this huge city, with its stores of heaped-up wealth,”
Jurgis gradually realizes, “human creatures might be hunted down and destroyed
by the wild-beast powers of nature, just as truly as they were in the days of the
cave men!” The realization comes to him as he and his fellow immigrants encoun-
ter virtually every evil to be found in American industry, politics, and society.
With poor English, they are easily exploited by those in power: the packers and
their foremen, the police, the political bosses, the real-estate dealers, and all the
rest of the “upper-class.” Jurgis has to pay graft to get and keep his job. The
real-estate man cheats him by selling him a house on the instalment plan with
hidden clauses the Lithuanian cannot read, and which eventually cause him to
lose his home. He is mercilessly speeded up on the job and suffers injuries. He and
his family are afflicted by terrible diseases. He is laid off and blacklisted, then goes
to prison for smashing the face of a brutal boss. One by one, Jurgis and his group
are crushed. Older men are thrown on the scrap heap to starve; women turn to
prostitution to survive; Ona, attended in childbirth by an ignorant midwife, dies
for lack of proper care; Jurgis and Ona’s infant son is drowned in one of the vile
pools of green water surrounding their shack. The catalog of suffering is remorse-
less. Sinclair does not spare the squeamish reader and his narrative approach is
the reverse of subtle. Each episode is packed with what seems like redundant
detail, to emphasize the point and ensure an air of authenticity. Each character,
even Jurgis, is drawn in plain, strong terms rather than in delicate nuances, since
the focus is on action and argument rather than personality. Each moment in this
account of the hero’s wanderings through the jungle of capitalism is unashamedly
melodramatic and didactic. Yet the accumulative power of the novel is undenia-
ble. Like many other, major works of realism or Naturalism, The Jungle achieves
its impact from its sheer remorselessness, using the technique of the sledgeham-
mer rather than the rapier. By the end of the story, the reader feels that he has
suffered the burden of Jurgis’s life with him. And, characteristically, Sinclair turns
despair into hope in the final chapters. Broken, Jurgis discovers socialism, which
mends him and makes him a “new man.” He is “delivered from the thralldom of
despair,” we learn; and he is privileged to witness widespread socialist gains in the
elections of 1904. The final words of the novel, “CHICAGO WILL BE OURS!,”GGray_c03.indd 304ray_c 03 .indd 304 8 8/1/2011 7:54:26 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 26 AM