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111 pages 3 hours read

Upton Sinclair

The Jungle

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1905

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Important Quotes

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“The veselija is a compact, a compact not expressed, but therefore only the more binding upon all. Everyone’s share was different—and yet everyone knew perfectly well what his share was, and strove to give a little more. Now, however, since they had come to the new country, all this was changing; it seemed as if there must be some subtle poison in the air that one breathed here—it was affecting all the young men at once. They would come in crowds and fill themselves with a fine dinner, and then sneak off.”


(Chapter 1, Pages 15-16)

After moving to America, Ona and Jurgis’s families do their best to bring their heritage and culture with them. This includes the veselija: an extravagant wedding feast to which all are invited. Traditionally, however, the guests are expected to show their gratitude during the acziavimas, when all the men take turns dancing with the bride and then donate a small amount of money to the newlyweds. The fact that many of the guests at Ona and Jurgis’s wedding do not abide by this custom poses financial difficulties for the family. It also serves as an early example of capitalism’s corrosive effects. The guests are presumably struggling to make ends meet themselves, but Sinclair implies that there is also a “subtle” moral influence at play in their negligence; life in America has taught them to be more self-interested.

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“All the sordid suggestions of the place were gone—in the twilight it was a vision of power. To the two who stood watching while the darkness swallowed it up, it seemed a dream of wonder, with its tale of human energy, of things being done, of employment for thousands upon thousands of men, of opportunity and freedom, of life and love and joy.” 


(Chapter 2 , Page 32)

As the family first approaches Packingtown, the air and land grow more and more polluted; smoke makes the skies dark and cloudy, plants struggle to grow, and the entire area smells of butchered and rotting meat. This pollution poses problems in and of itself—for instance, Sinclair will later describe how run-off from the area’s landfills ends up in a lake the city cuts for ice—but it is also symbolic of the corruption that capitalism breeds. Having just arrived, however, Jurgis and Ona see Packingtown very differently; they still believe in the promise of American capitalism and consequently see the neighborhood’s appearance as the result of innovation and industriousness.

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“[T]o Jurgis it seemed almost profanity to speak about the place as did Jokubas, skeptically; it was a thing as tremendous as the universe—the laws and ways of its working no more than the universe to be questioned or understood. All that a mere man could do, it seemed to Jurgis, was to take a thing like this as he found it, and do as he was told; to be given a place in it and a share in its wonderful activities was a blessing to be grateful for, as one was grateful for the sunshine and the rain.” 


(Chapter 3, Pages 44-45)

Jurgis’s first impressions of the meatpacking warehouses speak to his naivete and to the nature of capitalist ideology in turn-of-the-century America. Broadly speaking, capitalism was seen as both desirable and inevitable, whether as a product of “rationally self-interested" human nature, as in Adam Smith and classical liberalism, or as a product of evolutionary law, as in social Darwinism. Knowingly or not, Jurgis echoes these ideas in describing the meatpacking industry as akin to natural phenomena like sunshine and rain. In fact, Jurgis continues to regard the system as natural and unavoidable even as he grows more and more frustrated with its injustice. This is one of the reasons socialist philosophy comes as such a revelation to him: it critiques capitalism in a way that implies it can be changed. 

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“It was the kind of thing the man of the family had to decide and carry through, he told himself. Others might have failed at it, but he was not the failing kind—he would show them how to do it. He would work all day, and all night, too, if need be.” 


(Chapter 4, Page 54)

Jurgis’s response to the family’s uncertainty regarding the house they’re considering purchasing is noteworthy. In taking it upon himself to make the final decision, Jurgis sees himself as acting as “the man of the family,” assuming responsibility for the family’s well-being and proactively taking steps to secure it. Likewise, his determination to provide for his family through hard work and perseverance is very much in line with turn-of-the-century ideas about the appropriate role for a husband and father. The passage as a whole therefore speaks to Jurgis’s aspirations toward a kind of middle-class family life closely associated with capitalist ideology—one that involves home ownership and also a particular set of gender norms that cast men as breadwinners and women as homemakers. 

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“So from top to bottom the place was simply a seething cauldron of jealousies and hatreds; there was not loyalty or decency anywhere about it, there was no place in it where a man counted for anything against a dollar.” 


(Chapter 5, Pages 55-56)

Tamoszius offers the above summary of life in Packingtown when Jurgis approaches him about the corruption of his father Antanas’s supervisor. At the time, his explanation falls on deaf ears; Jurgis still largely believes he can overcome the challenges the system poses through sheer hard work and determination. Nevertheless, Tamoszius’s words encapsulate the moral criticism Sinclair levels at capitalism: Any system that values profit over human life, he suggests, is bound to corrupt those who come in contact with it.

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“[Y]ou were environed by hostile powers that were trying to get your money, and who used all the virtues to bait their traps with. The storekeepers plastered up their windows with all sorts of lies to entice you; the very fences by the wayside, the lamp posts and telegraph poles, were pasted over with lies.” 


(Chapter 7, Page 82)

Although the novel’s criticism of capitalism primarily concerns its impact on laborers, it also devotes some attention to the dangers capitalism poses to consumers. The most famous example of this is of course Sinclair’s critique of the meatpacking industry’s many unsanitary practices. But the above passage touches on a different threat: predatory advertising. When Jurgis and his family first arrive in the United States, they naively see the widespread advertisements as earnest attempts to help them: “It was quite touching, the zeal of people to see that his health and happiness were provided for. Did the person wish to smoke? There was a little discourse about cigars, showing him exactly why the Thomas Jefferson Five-cent Perfecto was the only cigar worthy of the name” (59). By this point, however, Jurgis realizes that such advertisements are simply another facet of the capitalist quest to make as much money as possible, even if it means selling people inferior products they can’t really afford. 

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“Anybody who could invent a new imitation had been sure of a fortune from old Durham, said Jurgis’s informant; but it was hard to think of anything new in a place where so many sharp wits had been at work for so long; where men welcomed tuberculosis in the cattle they were feeding, because it made them fatten more quickly.” 


(Chapter 9, Page 109)

Although not the most graphic of Sinclair’s descriptions of spoiled and adulterated food, the above passage nevertheless sheds light on the meatpacking company’s rationale for acting as they do. At their core, the companies exist not to provide people with food but to turn a profit for their owners. Since it’s cheaper to flavor the byproducts of the packing process than to invest in genuine ham, chicken, or grouse, this is exactly what the companies do. Clearly, this practice reveals a disregard for the safety of their customers, but as the anecdote about tuberculosis in cattle underscores, health—human or animal—is not the companies’ primary concern.

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“But day by day the music of Tamoszius’s violin became more passionate and heart-breaking; and Marija would sit with her hands clasped and her cheeks wet and all her body a-tremble, hearing in the wailing melodies the voices of the unborn generations which cried out in her for life.”


(Chapter 10, Page 118)

Sinclair reserves some of his harshest criticism for capitalism’s effects on the family and on women. These two things are interrelated; by the gender norms of the time, marriage and especially motherhood were considered the crowning achievements of a woman’s life. For this reason, Marija’s desperate desire to have children and her inability to do so are sharp indictments of the capitalist system. She is forced to work outside the home and is not even able to earn enough money by doing so to marry and raise children. 

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“Ona would try patent medicines, one after another, as her friends told her about them. As these all contained alcohol, or some other stimulant, she found that they all did her good while she took them; and so she was always chasing the phantom of good health, and losing it because she was too poor to continue.” 


(Chapter 10, Page 122)

Ona’s decline into ill health is caused and exacerbated by the economic system under which she lives. Poverty and the threat of losing her job force her to return to work before she’s recovered from childbirth, permanently weakening her and preventing her from properly mothering her newborn son. In fact, the two are interrelated as Sinclair portrays them: the doctor attending Ona tells her that nursing Antanas is important for her own well-being. Then, as the above passage describes, Ona resorts to taking various medicines that have no long-term benefits but are, though often addictive, at least temporarily “helpful.” As a result, she continues to buy them until she can no longer afford to and then repeats the process over again. This is precisely the goal of those making the medicines, because it ensures that the people taking them will keep spending money on them indefinitely.

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“It was like seeing the world falling away from underneath his feet; like plunging down into a bottomless abyss, into yawning caverns of despair. It might be true, then, after all, what others had told him about life, that the best powers of a man might not be equal to it! It might be true that, strive as he would, toil as he would, he might fail, and go down and be destroyed!” 


(Chapter 11, Page 130)

Jurgis’s injured ankle lays bare the lie that he has continued to cling to even as he learned more and more about the cruelty, corruption, and dishonesty of the meatpacking industry: that an individual could at the very least manage to stay afloat through hard work and dedication. Now, however, Jurgis has lost his source of income through no fault of his own—if anything, his injury resulted from the treacherous conditions in which he was working—and he realizes that his own blamelessness will not prevent him or his family from sliding into poverty. The episode is therefore one of many intended to illustrate the false promises of American capitalism.

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“[The woman] stayed right there—hour after hour, day after day, year after year, twisting sausage links and racing with death. It was piecework, and she was apt to have a family to keep alive; and stern and ruthless economic laws had arranged it that she could only do this by working just as she did, with all her soul upon her work, and with never an instant for a glance at the well-dressed ladies and gentlemen who came to stare at her, as at some wild beast in a menagerie.” 


(Chapter 13, Page 149)

The above passage describes the sausage-making job Elzbieta finds, but it is in many ways representative of all assembly-line work under industrial capitalism. Although the repetitiveness of the labor is mind-numbing, the speed at which workers are required to perform forces them to concentrate entirely on their task. Coupled with the fact that workers spend nearly all their waking hours on the job, this results in the gradual deadening of all curiosity, imagination, and passion. As Sinclair says a few pages later, “every faculty that was not needed for the machine was doomed to be crushed out of existence” (152). The above passage renders this process of dehumanization even more explicit by likening the workers to animals in a zoo, which wealthy visitors can come and gawk at.

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“That was their law, that was their justice! […] There was no justice, there was no right, anywhere in it—it was only force, it was tyranny, the will and the power, reckless and unrestrained!”


(Chapter 16, Pages 179-180)

As disillusioned as Jurgis has grown with American capitalism by this point, he doesn’t yet have the ability to articulate the nature of the system—that won’t happen until he hears a socialist speech in Chapter 28. Nevertheless, his first arrest is a tipping point in his character arc. The fact that it is Jurgis alone who ends up in jail after Connor repeatedly coerces Ona into having sex reveals the moral bankruptcy of the legal system. As Jurgis observes here, the law isn’t truly interested in protecting the rights of the American people; rather, it exists to serve the interests of the owner class. For that reason, the legal system punishes Jurgis for lashing out against a superior while overlooking the injustice of Connor’s actions. Jurgis recognizes this, making the moment “the beginning of his rebellion, of his outlawry and his unbelief” (180).

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“Their home! Their home! They had lost it! Grief, despair, rage, overwhelmed him—what was any imagination of the thing to this heart-breaking, crushing reality of it—to the sight of strange people living in his house, hanging their curtains in his windows, staring at him with hostile eyes!” 


(Chapter 18 , Page 199)

The loss of the family home is devastating for the financial waste it represents—by the time they are evicted, they have spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars in payments—and as a death knell to their hopes of a better life. In owning a home of their own and furnishing it according to their tastes, the family aspired to a middle-class lifestyle. It’s now clear that that lifestyle will forever be beyond their reach. In fact, Ona’s death, and the death of her second, unborn child, follow directly on the heels of this loss, putting an even more final end to any idyllic visions of family life in America. 

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“They had his name by this time in St. Louis and New York, in Omaha and Boston, in Kansas City and St Joseph. He was condemned and sentenced, without trial and without appeal; he could never work for the packers again.” 


(Chapter 20, Page 221)

Jurgis’s experience of being blacklisted after attacking Connor reveals the hollowness of what the novel describes as “political liberty” when it’s coupled with “wage slavery” (352). Because Jurgis needs a job in order to survive, the meatpacking companies effectively sentence him and his family to death by preventing him from finding employment. What’s more, they’re able to do this without even the pretense of respect for Jurgis’s rights that a trial would provide. The episode bolsters Sinclair’s broader argument for the necessity of socialism, depicting political rights as meaningless in the absence of economic rights.

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“He was a terrible child to manage, was Antanas, but his father did not mind that—he would watch him and smile to himself with satisfaction. The more of a fighter he was the better—he would need to fight before he got through.” 


(Chapter 21, Page 235)

Jurgis and Ona’s infant son is important primarily for the symbolic role he plays in the novel. Born in the first year of the couple’s marriage, Antanas is “the child of his parents’ youth and joy” (156), sharing in the relative strength and optimism his parents then enjoyed. These traits persist even as the rest of the family grows weaker and more desperate; as a result, he represents Jurgis’s last hope of coming out on top of the capitalist struggle. Antanas’s sudden death crushes this dream of one day “getting through,” if only via his son. In addition, it severs Jurgis’s final tie to Ona’s family and temporarily kills any sense of responsibility he feels to anyone but himself. Antanas’s death serves as yet another reminder of capitalism’s tendency to exacerbate humanity’s worst instincts by destroying the conditions and experiences—like parenthood—that promote love, selflessness, and compassion.  

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“He had wasted his life, he had wrecked himself, with his accursed weakness; and now he was done with it—he would tear it out of him, root and branch! There should be no more tears and no more tenderness; he had had enough of them—they had sold him into slavery! Now he was going to be free, to tear off his shackles, to rise up and fight.” 


(Chapter 22, Pages 239-240)

As Sinclair describes here, Jurgis’s response to the death of his beloved son is to attempt to crush every tender and selfless feeling, impulse, or memory he has. His goal in doing so isn’t simply to dull his grief but to avoid falling again into what he now sees as the trap of family life or any sort of responsibility to others. Jurgis comes to believe that the only way to get by in a capitalist society is to consider no one’s needs but his own. In a sense, Sinclair suggests that this is true; the system doesn’t reward concern for others. However, the novel depicts this as one of the most pernicious moral effects of capitalism, and one that makes the more cooperative and communal worldview of socialism all the more necessary.   

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“He saw the world of civilization then more plainly than ever he had seen it before; a world in which nothing counted but brutal might, an order devised by those who possessed it for the subjugation of those who did not. He was one of the latter; and all outdoors, all life, was to him one colossal prison, which he paced like a pent-up tiger, trying one bar after another, and finding them all beyond his power. He had lost in the fierce battle of greed, and so was doomed to be exterminated.” 


(Chapter 24, Page 261)

Jurgis’s description of life as a “battle of greed” is a variation on a social Darwinist thread that recurs throughout the novel. In the capitalist system, Sinclair suggests, society is a struggle for survival in which it isn’t the most deserving who succeed; it is the most ruthless, dishonest, and amoral. Furthermore, those who do succeed use whatever means they can to preserve their own power, rendering the courts, the electoral process, and other levers of democracy as mere tools of their own “brutal might.” For Jurgis, there is therefore little distinction between the time he spent in prison and the time he spends in the “prison” outside of it. The capitalist class that has life-and-death power over him and the legal system that protects the interests of that class are two sides of the same coin.

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“‘Hangin’ on the verge of starvation,’ I says—‘for the honour of the family—sen’ me some bread.’” 


(Chapter 24, Page 265)

When Jurgis happens to approach Freddie Jones—the son of a meatpacking baron—for money, Freddie takes a liking to him on account of what he sees as their shared plight; his father has attached strings to his allowance, and he equates this situation to Jurgis’s own poverty. Notably, he doesn’t say any of this callously; in fact, Sinclair generally depicts Freddie as a likable young man who genuinely wants to help Jurgis. In a certain sense, however, it is precisely Freddie’s innocence that makes the episode so damning, as it implies that even the most well-meaning members of the ruling classes are oblivious to the extent of their own wealth and the amount of suffering the concentration of that wealth causes.

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“‘It’s a case of us or the other fellow, and I say the other fellow every time,’ he observed.

‘Still,’ said Jurgis reflectively, ‘he never did us any harm.’

‘He was doing it to somebody as hard as he could, you can be sure of that,’ said his friend.” 


(Chapter 25, Page 284)

The above exchange takes place the morning after Jurgis first helps Duane with a robbery. Learning from the newspaper that the man they knocked out lost three fingers to frostbite, Jurgis expresses remorse, which Duane seeks to assuage by arguing that they had no choice in the matter. Duane’s account of the world’s ruthlessness is not exactly wrong; it echoes Sinclair’s depiction of capitalism as a jungle in which those who survive do so by preying on others. Nevertheless, Duane’s response—trying to beat the wealthy at their own game—is not one the novel ultimately endorses because it results in a similarly corrupt and self-interested worldview. Instead, Sinclair suggests that the only true way forward lies in the solidarity and common purpose of socialism.  

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“[T]here was universal exultation over this triumph of popular government, this crushing defeat of an arrogant plutocrat by the power of the common people.” 


(Chapter 25, Page 296)

Jurgis’s stint as a political fixer provides Sinclair with an opportunity to showcase just how thoroughly the turn-of-the-century American political system was in thrall to corporate interests. Scully—a major player in Chicago Democratic politics—tasks Jurgis with working to swing the election of an alderman to the Republicans because he’s concerned that he wouldn’t have sufficient influence over the Democratic nominee. The Republicans are party to the scheme, agreeing to nominate a friend of Scully’s in exchange for nominal victory in a heavily Democratic area. However, because the Democratic nominee was a wealthy brewer, the people whom Jurgis persuades to vote Republican do so in the belief that they are delivering a “crushing defeat [to] an arrogant plutocrat,” when in reality they are acting precisely as the leaders of both parties—and, by extension, the “plutocrats”—want them to. The episode thus helps Sinclair make his case for the impossibility of reforming the existing political system. What looks like reform, he suggests, often serves the interests of those in power, not least by deluding the public into thinking they are making progress.  

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“‘When people are starving, […] and they have anything with a price, they ought to sell it, I say. I guess you realize it now when it’s too late. Ona could have taken care of us all, in the beginning.’ Marija spoke without emotion, as one who had come to regard things from the business point of view.” 


(Chapter 27, Page 327)

For both Jurgis and Sinclair, Marija’s suggestion that Ona could have supported the family by prostituting herself is an indication of how far she has fallen. She is so jaded that she calmly accepts the capitalist logic that tends to reduce everything—in this case, women’s bodies—to a commodity. Given how central chastity was to female gender norms of the time, the passage would have been particularly shocking to the novel’s earliest readers. 

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“Jurgis was a man whose soul had been murdered, who had ceased to hope and to struggle—who had made terms with degradations and despair; and now suddenly, in one awful convulsion, the black and hideous fact was made plain to him!”


(Chapter 28, Page 345)

The idea that capitalism destroys both the bodies and souls of workers is central to Sinclair’s critique. The effort required simply to survive and the hopelessness of trying to escape the daily struggle have a brutalizing effect; workers have no time or energy to devote to friendships, education, hobbies, or art, and they eventually become so used to this state of affairs that they no longer wish for anything better. Worse still, those who participate in the system often compromise their own morals to get ahead, degrading themselves and hurting those around them. Nevertheless, Sinclair depicts this spiritual “death” as reversible once workers are given the tools—specifically, socialism—to understand their situation. 

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“[N]ow his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just what he had been—one of the packers’ hogs. What they wanted from a hog was what they wanted from the working man, and also that was what they wanted from the public.” 


(Chapter 29 , Page 354)

The above passage is key to understanding why Sinclair chose to set his critique of capitalism in the meatpacking warehouses. For one, the livestock that passes through these warehouses functions as part of the work’s broader animal motif and thus underscores the dehumanizing impact of capitalism on laborers. Beyond that, the industry illustrates capitalism’s priorities in a particularly literal way, extracting as much profit as possible from the animals it slaughters. Similarly, Sinclair suggests, the capitalist system writ large is interested only in squeezing everything it can from both workers and consumers, even if doing so ends up hurting or killing them.  

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“[A]fter thirty years of fighting, the year 1896 had served to convince [Hinds] that the power of concentrated wealth could never be controlled, but could only be destroyed.” 


(Chapter 30 , Page 358)

Hinds arrives at socialism after decades of attempting to enact progressive change via unionization and traditional electoral politics: “[h]e had been a reform member of the city council, he had been a Greenbacker, a Labour Unionist, a Populist, a Bryanite” (359). By “Bryanite,” Sinclair is referring to supporters of Democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan, who was nominated in 1896 on a populist economic platform. The above passage alludes to his ultimate defeat by Republican William McKinley, which proved to be the final straw for Hinds, convincing him that the capitalist system could not be reformed from within. This is also the position the novel takes, depicting capitalism as an ideology that is immoral by its very nature. 

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“Schliemann called himself a ‘philosophic anarchist’; and he explained that an anarchist was one who believed that the end of human existence was the free development of every personality, unrestricted by laws save those of its own being.” 


(Chapter 31, Page 377)

The above passage takes place in the context of the distinction Schliemann draws between material and intellectual goods; he is in favor of public ownership of the former—which are both finite and necessary for human life—but near total autonomy with regards to the latter. The passage is a rebuttal to the view expressed in the preceding chapter that socialism is incompatible with individualism. As Schliemann sees it, socialism is a necessary precondition for true individualism, since capitalism prevents most people from developing to their full potential: “The majority of human beings were not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others” (385). The novel as a whole takes a similar stance, depicting the personalities of characters like Elzbieta and Marija as hopelessly stunted by poverty and dehumanizing working conditions.

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