Based on the The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, discuss the social problems of industrialization, in relation to the development of the USA, and how capitalism is hostile to the American Dream

Running head : American Dream

Industrialization , Capitalism and American Dream

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Industrialization , Capitalism and American Dream

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is a novel whose veracity actually became a of federal investigation , provides another interesting example of the complex relation between fact and fiction and between naturalism and other literary and nonliterary discourses . The Jungle in many ways presents the appearance of a conventional novel : it has character event , theme . Yet it is also profoundly shaped by

the documentary strategy

Although the novel is organized biographically , the course of the protagonist Jurgis Rudkus 's life follows a path which ensures that he will observe phenomena that interest Sinclair he is conducted through a series of experiences that are not only representative but comprehensive , for this account of the meat-packing industry and the conditions of life for immigrant workers attempts to be encyclopedic When the Rudkuses arrive in Chicago the first thing they do is tour the packinghouses , giving occasion for sentences like this one "The chutes into which the hogs went climbed high up -- to the very top of the distant buildings and Jokubas explained that the hogs went up by the power of their own legs , and then their weight carried them back through all the processes necessary to make them into pork " As Jurgis and other members of his family take jobs in various parts of the plants , the different operations -- slaughtering , processing , canning and so on -- are described in more detail . Jurgis also works in a harvester factory and a steel mill , passing through periods of prosperity and of unemployment and want eventually almost every vicissitude of working-class life befalls Jurgis or one of his relatives . Jurgis himself begins as a strong and successful wage earner , but he is injured on a job and has great difficulty supporting himself while recovering spends time in jail after a conflict with a foreman , tramps in both the country and the city , joins a union but later works as a scab and then as a foreman , reaps the benefits of corrupt machine politics , and finally becomes a Socialist . His wife is sexually exploited by her boss and dies in childbirth without competent medical care . His son drowns in a muddy street in Packingtown . His father dies of an illness caused by a job . His cousin becomes a prostitute . What Jurgis cannot experience at firsthand he learns about from others for example , his cousin tells harrowing stories of women forced into prostitution and explains why she cannot save any money working in a brothel 'I am charged for my room and my meals and such prices as you never heard of and then for extras , and drinks for everything I get , and some I don 't . Seeing that Jurgis was interested , she went on 'That 's the way they keep the girls -- they let them run up debts , so they can 't get away (p...