111 pages • 3 hours read
Upton SinclairThe Jungle
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1905A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Marija Berczynskas rushes from the church where her cousin Ona was just married in the rear room of a saloon. The festivities have already begun as Ona and her new husband, Jurgis, shyly take their seats beside one another. Ona’s stepmother Elzbieta brings in platters of food, and the guests sit down to eat.
After the meal, the guests move the furniture aside, the musicians begin playing again, and everyone dances. The crowd eventually forms a circle around Ona in preparation for the acziavimas: a dance that lasts several hours, during which all the male guests take turns dancing with the bride before gifting a small amount of money to the newlyweds. The acziavimas is particularly important to Ona and Jurgis’s families because they spent so much on the wedding itself: “Bit by bit these poor people have given up everything else; but to this they cling with all the power of their souls—they cannot give up the veselija!” (13).
As the evening continues, it becomes clear that not all the guests are paying their dues. The family grows more and more anxious, and Jurgis reassures Ona that he will work even harder to pay off the expenses. The festivities become less enthusiastic and more drunken as the night wears on, and the party eventually breaks up around three a.m. Ona is exhausted, so Jurgis picks her up and carries her home, telling her that she ought to stay home the following day. Ona protests that she can't miss work, and Jurgis reiterates that he will work harder.
Chapter 2 Summary
The story flashes back to Lithuania, more than a year before the wedding. Jurgis, who grew up on a small farm, first meets Ona at a horse fair; because of her young age and her family’s relative wealth and prominence, her father won’t agree to an engagement. However, when her father dies just a few months later, it leaves the family in a precarious financial situation. Elzbieta’s brother Jonas proposes emigrating to America, and Jurgis—now free to marry Ona—joins the party, along with his father Antanas.
Jurgis spends several months working on a railway to raise money for the trip, so the group doesn’t leave for America until the following summer; they plan to settle in Chicago’s meatpacking district. Dazed from the journey and the strangeness of America, the family at last arrives in a loud, smoky neighborhood with a “rich, almost rancid, sensual, and strong” odor to it (27). Here, they locate a shop run by a friend of Jonas—Jokubas Szedvilas—who he directs them to a lodging house run by a woman named Aniele Jukniene. Her home is cramped and filthy, but the family decides to stay there until they find work.
That same afternoon, Jurgis and Ona take a walk around the neighborhood, which sits atop a landfill. They reach a clearing still in use as a dumping ground and see children scouring it for food. Across the way are a brickyard and a lake: “First they took out the soil to make bricks, and then they filled it up again with garbage, which seemed to Jurgis and Ona a felicitous arrangement, characteristic of an enterprising country like America” (31).
Chapter 3 Summary
The next morning, Szedvilas reaches out to an acquaintance about jobs for Jonas and Antanas. Meanwhile, Jurgis visits Brown’s meatpacking warehouse and secures a position. Elated, the family spends the rest of the day touring Packingtown with Szedvilas as their guide.
First, Szedvilas takes them to the vast holding pens where incoming cattle are kept. All told, roughly ten thousand cattle arrive for slaughter daily, along with ten thousand hogs and five thousand sheep. The family watches as the animals are herded into chutes leading into the warehouses.
The group then goes to one of Durham’s buildings. From a visitor’s gallery, they watch as the hogs leaving the chute are shackled by their feet, hoisted up into the air, slaughtered one by one, and dropped into a vat of boiling water: “It was pork-making by machinery, pork-making by applied mathematics” (38). After this, the carcasses pass through assembly lines of workers tasked with making particular cuts. On another floor, people are busy making waste materials into sausage casings, lard, soap, and other products; there are also rooms for pickling, salting, smoking, and packaging various meat products.
Finally, the family visits a beef-processing plant where it is the workers themselves who move up and down a line of carcasses: “It was all highly specialized labor, each man having his task to do; generally this would consist of only two or three specific cuts, and he would pass down the line of fifteen or twenty carcasses, making these cuts upon each” (42). The warehouse also has areas for pickling, tanning, salting, and rendering; they even use the cattle’s horns, bones, and hooves to make objects like buttons and hairpins. Jurgis leaves the factories in awe of their modernity and proud to have become part of the meatpacking process.
Chapter 4 Summary
When Jurgis shows up for work the following day, he learns his job will be to sweep the extracted entrails of cattle through a trapdoor. Despite the heat and smell of the warehouse, Jurgis finds the work easy and returns home pleased with his earnings. In the meantime, Jonas and Marija have also found positions, leaving only Antanas still searching; the plan is for Ona and Elzbieta to keep house while Elzbieta’s children go to school.
The family discusses finding a place of their own. Jurgis has picked up a placard advertising houses for sale, and they debate whether buying would ultimately prove cheaper than renting. The next day, Marija, Ona, and Elzbieta speak to the agent mentioned in the placard who advises them to act quickly. The family goes to see the house the following Sunday, and the agent’s enthusiasm assuages many of their concerns: “The other houses in the row did not seem to be new, and few of them seemed to be occupied. When they ventured to hint at this, the agent's reply was that the purchasers would be moving in shortly” (52). The group has second thoughts that evening when Szedvilas warns them that property-buying is a “swindle” (53), but after a week’s more reflection, Jurgis decides they should go through with the purchase.
Szedvilas accompanies Elzbieta and Ona when they go to sign the deed. While looking over the papers, he suddenly exclaims that it’s a trick: the word “rental” appears several times. Alarmed, Elzbieta and the others go out in search of a lawyer to explain the papers to them. The lawyer confirms that the contract is a legitimate one, and Elzbieta—though still terrified—signs it.
When Jurgis hears the story that evening, he becomes angry and seeks out the opinion of a second lawyer, who agrees with the first: the contract is a proper deed of ownership. Jurgis rushes home to tell his family the good news.
Chapter 5 Summary
Over the next few days, the family excitedly considers how to furnish their new home, eventually settling on a furniture set that can be paid for in installments. After these furnishings are delivered, the family moves in: “[T]ired as they were, Jurgis and Ona sat up late, contented simply to hold each other and gaze in rapture about the room. […] [T]his was to be their home—that little room yonder would be theirs!” (61).
Meanwhile, Jurgis acclimates to the fast pace of his new job. He enjoys the hard work and struggles to understand why so many of his fellow laborers hate it. Likewise, he’s confused when he first meets a union delegate; in his mind, those who are dissatisfied or unable to keep up with their work should simply leave.
Antanas struggles to secure a position on account of his age, but finally finds one mopping a pickling room. He does so, however, only by agreeing to give a cut of his wages to his supervisor. Jurgis speaks about this with one of his new friends, Tamoszius Kuzleika, who tries to explain the nature of life in Packingtown to him: “After Jurgis had been there awhile he would know that the plants were simply honeycombed with rottenness of that sort” (65).
Antanas quickly grows to hate his job; among other things, he complains that the company gathers and reuses the run-off pickling chemicals. Soon after this, Jurgis learns that Marija got her job painting cans after the previous employee contracted tuberculosis and was fired. Similarly, Jonas replaced a man who died in a workplace accident. Before long, Jurgis becomes aware of questionable practices at his own warehouse, where pregnant cows, unborn calves, and cattle that died in transit are all routinely butchered in defiance of regulations.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
When The Jungle was first published, passages like this one involving the run-off pickling chemicals captured the public’s imagination:
[I]f that were not enough, there was a trap in the pipe, where all the scraps of meat and odds and ends of refuse were caught, and every few days it was the old man’s task to clean these out, and shovel their contents into one of the trucks with the rest of the meat! (67).
The threat these kinds of practices posed to public health was obvious, and the descriptions of them were so viscerally disgusting that the U.S. government had no choice but to respond to the public outcry.
For Sinclair, however, these practices are symptomatic of a much broader problem: the nature of capitalism itself, particularly as it existed in turn-of-the-century America. Having grown up on a rural farm, Jurgis is largely unfamiliar with industrial capitalism when he first encounters it. Nevertheless, his initial views of Packingtown indicate his acceptance and admiration of capitalism as an ideology. Because he is young, strong, and determined, he finds it easy to believe that those who are struggling are simply weak or lazy: “[Jurgis] would not have known how to pronounce laissez faire, but he had been round the world enough to know that a man has to shift for himself in it, and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody to listen to him holler” (64). At the time Sinclair was writing, arguments of this kind were commonplace. In their most extreme form, they constituted a kind of “social Darwinism”—the idea that those who were “fittest” would naturally rise to the top of the social hierarchy thanks to their industry, intelligence, and other positive qualities. Indeed, Jurgis and his family come to America specifically because they believe it is a place where those willing and able to work hard can build a better life for themselves.
By Chapter 5, however, there are already clear indications that Packingtown is not the place the family imagined it to be. For one, it is beginning to emerge that some of those who find themselves out of work—like the woman Marija replaced—do so through no fault of their own. Moreover, the efficiency and economy Jurgis so admires while watching the slaughter of the hogs has a dark side: it is precisely this determination not to let anything go to waste that leads the meatpacking companies to sell meat that is obviously unfit to eat.
By cutting corners in this way, the companies’ main goal is not to reduce waste per se but to maximize their own profits. As the novel progresses, it will become clear that this is Sinclair’s central critique of capitalism: By definition, it’s an economic system in which goods—including basic necessities—are produced for the profit of an owner class. In other words, its primary goal is not to provide people with the products they need to survive but to generate wealth. Sinclair was certainly not the first socialist to make this point; most famously, it formed part of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ philosophy. In writing The Jungle, however, Sinclair hoped to illustrate the full extent to which capitalism devalues life. He begins to hint at this as early as Chapter 3 with his description of assembly-line slaughter. Although the lives in question belong to animals rather than to people, Sinclair treats them sympathetically, while also suggesting an analogy to human existence under capitalism: “In these chutes the stream of animals was continuous […] a very river of death. Our friends were not poetical, and the sight suggested to them no metaphors of human destiny; they thought only of the wonderful efficiency of it all” (36).
