The mill is too far for Jurgis to return to the boardinghouse
during the week, so he travels home only on the weekends. He loves
his son with an overwhelming devotion. Antanas’s first attempts
at speech provide no end of delight to Jurgis. Jurgis begins to
read the Sunday paper with the help of the children and settles
in a livable routine. But he returns to the boardinghouse one day
only to discover that a freak accident has occurred: Antanas has
drowned in the mire of mud in the streets.
Analysis: Chapters 18–21
The narrative shape of The Jungle is
extremely simple: it exposes the fallacy of the American Dream by
portraying the gradual destruction of the immigrant family at the
hands of the forces of capitalism. Every section, every chapter,
and nearly every individual event throughout most of the book operates
according to this plan. In this section, not surprisingly, the family
continues to suffer greater and greater misfortunes. Their
home, the symbol of family life, has been taken from them; the building
looks as if the family never even lived there. Jurgis’s return to
his home is a metaphor for the cyclical nature of generations of
immigrants. These waves of immigrants pass through Packingtown and
its misery—the only constant in their lives.
Moreover, the second- and third-generation children of
earlier waves of immigrants seem to forget that their ancestors
suffered the very same abuses that they now perpetrate on the newer
generations of immigrants. As theories about eugenics (a science
concerned with improving a specific race’s hereditary qualities)
arose in the late nineteenth century, making claims about the inherent
inferiority of nonwhite peoples and white peoples of certain descent,
Americans became hostile toward the waves of immigrants whom they
perceived as infiltrators spoiling the purity of the American people.
The first waves were constituted largely of northern and western
Europeans. The Irish, then, stereotyped as potato-eating drunks,
were among the early targets of ridicule. With the arrival of later
waves of immigrants, largely from southern and eastern Europe, these
earlier immigrants sought to take advantage of these new immigrants.
Phil Connor, for example, an Irishman, takes part in the abuse and
degradation that, a few decades earlier, the Irish suffered at the
hands of more powerful ethnic groups. Historical memory is short
if not nonexistent in The Jungle.
These chapters also function as the next stage of Sinclair’s
attack on capitalism. Earlier, he shows that child labor laws do
nothing to stop child labor, implying that it is not possible to
improve working conditions and labor practices from within the structures
of capitalism. Jurgis’s job at the harvester factory expounds upon
the same idea. The factory supposedly functions according to philanthropic values,
and the facilities are cleaner and the working conditions more pleasant.
Nevertheless, the factory shuts down periodically after the rush
season just like other factories, leaving thousands of laborers
without the income necessary to survive. The factory’s philanthropic
values do nothing to change the essentially precarious existence
of wage laborers. Again, working from within capitalism fails to
provide wage laborers with a secure, decent living.
The young woman who secures Jurgis a job with her recommendation
shows compassion in an otherwise cruel world. However, her actions
do nothing to change the dangerous working conditions in the steel
factory where her fiancé is a superintendent—Jurgis witnesses several
men suffer horrendous, disabling accidents in the steel mill. Neither
does her kind action make a difference in the dangerous conditions
in the slums where wage laborers live. She helps Jurgis secure an
income, but Antanas still drowns in the unpaved, muddy streets outside
the boarding house. Through this example, Sinclair argues, pessimistically,
that individual philanthropists working within the structures of
capitalism are likewise ineffective at changing the lives of wage
laborers for the better.
