Customer Reviews

The Jungle (Barnes & Noble Classics)

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While clearly a fictional story and often dramatized, The Jungle provides a striking depiction of Chicago's meatpacking industry at the turn of the century through the eyes of a Lithuanian immigrant. The story works well on two levels.

First, the story is very interesting and intriguing. The characters are easy to relate to and although the first chapter starts of slowly, the book is difficult to put down at times. The picture Sinclair presents is very vivid and the emotions of his characters are communicated very well through his prose.

Second, and more importantly, the novel becomes much more interesting when evaluated in a historical context. The novel presents a vivid depiction of Chicago's Packingtown. While the story itself is fictional, the setting certainly is not (Sinclair even lived there for a bit to experience the environment). Sinclair's naturalistic style of writing brings out vivid depictions of working and living conditions of workers in the meatpacking industry and their families. Often times, the description of a single room goes on for pages and exposes every detail of the image in Sinclair's mind. The political aspect of the novel is also particularly interesting, as the novel shows the corruption of boss-run politics. Unfortunately, Sinclair's Socialist affiliation plays too large a role in the novel. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that the only reason Sinclair puts Jurgis through hardship is to prove the superiority of Socialism. The last third of the novel is purely Socialist propaganda and the entire plot and storyline disintegrate in favor of a conversation regarding the merits of Socialism.

Regardless of its heavy political bias, The Jungle provides insight into life at the turn of the century. Furthermore its influence in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act makes it a historically important novel worth experiencing.

I first read this book about 8 years ago in a High School history class. Since then I have read it twice and I did a college thesis on it; it is one of my favorite books. The first time I read the hardcover book; the next two times I listened to the unabridged audiobook and enjoyed it so much better.

This book is hard to read... although the cliff notes book helped! I got it because I know it was instrumental in the establishment of good manufacturing practices and the original Food & Drug Act of 1906. The writing is different from today's since we obviously speak and write different than people did 100 years ago, so it was hard to keep focused and the reading was slow. In the end it was informative, a bit graphic, and easy to understand why it played such a key role in getting laws passed to keep our foods and medications safe. Obviously, something that is important to everyone.

Cicero once wrote, 'It is an outrageous abuse both of time and literature for a man to commit his thoughts to writing without having the ability either to arrange them or manifest them, or attract readers by some charm of style."

This book is a naturalistic novel with poor prose. Melodramatic and sensationalistic. It is functionally aligned to what was characterized as 'dime-novels' during the era in which it was written. The prose is so heinous it made me think the writer Mr. Sinclair must have been mentally exiguous. I had difficulty affirming in my own mind as I read this book that it was actually written by an adult, and not a fourteen-year-old child; notwithstanding a supposed professional novelist at that. Charles Dickens worked in a garment factory when he was a teenager as well as had a far less well-off beginning to life than that of Mr. Sinclair, yet Mr. Dickens could express with the most refined art and effort such an ease of pen dazzling the reader in every line. Dickens had indubitably an eye for detail and perfection that Sinclair's intellectual apathy could never aspire to grasp.

For a more eminent literary personification of the naturalistic novel genre, I would suggest reading Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. The naturalistic novel was always a phantasm of reality, but there were well-written ones and poorly written ones; this one by Upton Sinclair is a literary peril to say the least.

This book is exceptional only its ridiculousness. The characters are passive, dull, cliché, and often utterly puerile in their own conceptualization of their circumstances (this reflects upon the limited thought process of the writer).

In respect to the vulgarity discussed by Sinclair regarding the food industry of this era it should be noted the industry had already been exposed by various NON-fiction writers of the period (preceding Sinclair), and much (the emphasis being much, not all) of the industry had consequently been reformed apropos to the processing of food by the time this book was published. Essentially the government mandated regulatory reforms that were instituted the following year as a result of the popularity of this book were unnecessary, most significantly postulated on aberrational phenomena, and were superficial in remonstrance (oh but they made the public feel good inside). Conversely had Sinclair decided to be objective in his critique of the meatpacking industry in contrast to producing 'muckracking' so-called journalism derived out of his own subjective views in support of socialist ideology he would have discovered the previously mentioned actuality, but since this is a work of fiction he could write anything he wished, and he did. Why Sinclair went down the road of sensationalism in this novel may be attributable to the failures of his first four books. However, because he decided to go down that road he cannot be taken seriously as a scholar in any regard.

It should be noted that Sinclair was not merely a metaphorical socialist, he was a literal one (he was an unsuccessful Socialist Party candidate in the U.S.). In historical context Sinclair's political persuasion was during an era when the progressive political faction was gaining in popularity in America, so as a socialist ideologue he [Sinclair] was even further to the left politically than the progressives (he could be paralleled with a Michael Moore type in the present-era).

This book is a literary work of fiction, and should not be taken earnestly as a non-fictional scholarly critique. With that noted it also falls short in regard to literary style, and because the characters are passively portrayed by Sinclair in contrast to being actively portrayed it is difficult for the reader to form any authentic connection with them (they exist more as abstractions).