Chapters 10 and 11

In these two chapters Jurgis and his family go through really hard times. They begin to realize that life is not easy and things definitely do not go as planned.

"This was in truth not living; it was scarcely even existing, and they felt that it was too little for the price they paid. They were willing to work all the time; and when people did their best, ought they not be able to keep alive?"

Almost every family member works and does their best at it. Jurgis works from early in the morning til late in the night, and only stays home on Sunday. Soon after Ona has her baby, she returns to work. Still they can barely manage to get by. Times haven't changed much. Even now families work as hard as they can and like the family in the book they barely manage to live.

"The coming out of this boy was a decisive event with Jurgis. It made him irrevocably a family man; it killed the last lingering impulse that he might have had to go out in the evenings and sit and talk with the men at the salons."

This was a sign of hope for the family. Even when they were barely making it, and they were so miserable. The baby came and Jurgis forgot bout his troubles and was able to realize that he had more important things to worry about than going out.

In chapter eleven a bad turn of events happened to the family.

"She broke into a run, shouting to the people to ask what was the matter, but not stopping to hear what they answered, till she had come to where the throng was so dense that she could no longer advance. There was a 'run on the bank,' they told her then, but she did not know what that was, and turned from one person to another, trying on agony of fear to make out what they meant."

Marija had put her money in a bank and as she walked past it on her way to work one morning she noticed that people were surrounding it. They said that there was a "run on the bank" which means people who are members of the bank believe for one reason or another that the bank will fail, so they try to withdraw all of their money at one time.

"The injury was not one that Durham and Company could be held responsible for, and so that was all there was to it, so far as the doctor was concerned." 

Jurgis hurt his foot and was ordered out of work for weeks. The book takes place in early nineteen hundreds, and workers compensation did not begin til mid nineteen hundreds. So the company that Jurgis worked for did not cover his injuries. Therefore he would be out of work with no pay. No one knows when something like this might happen, and the family definitely was not prepared for it. This is bad for many reasons but mainly because if Jurgis cannot go to work, he could lose his job to someone else that can be at work every day. The family is going through some hard times right now in the novel and it doesn’t look like they are going to make it much longer. Especially if they have another mouth to feed.

"It was a week before Christmas that they first great storm came, and the soul of Jurgis rose up within him like a lion."

This is a simile that compares Jurgis' soul with a lion. 

Chapters 6 and 7

Chapter 6

In chapter 6, we meet a new dreadful and very negative character: Grandmother Majauszkiene. She tells them how they have been fooled like many before them. She tells them that they are going to have to pay interest and as soon as a payment is missed they could be evicted. This changes the mood from a hopeful and cheerful family to worried and sorrowful victims.

Grandmother Majauszkiene however, is safe with her current situation.
"her son was a skilled man, who made as high as a hundred dollars a month, and as he had had sense enough not to marry, they had been able to pay for the house"
This is symbolic of every immigrant family in Packingtown. They come to this foreign place with the idea that they will be living the American dream and getting rich in no time at all, but they get married and get caught having to support a family and having nowhere else to go to get a job. Jurgis is already beginning to find himself in this situation. His biggest dreams are being crushed and things are taking a turn for the worst. Jurgis believed he could support the whole family by himself and now everyone is having to work. Stanislovas even has to lie about his age to work.

Child labor was a very common thing in the early 1900's. Although some states were finally adding laws and regulations child labor was still a problem. In the 1900's child labor peaked and started to decline because unions and socialistic ideas and movements were fighting to bring a stop to this torturous thing. It would seem like a good thing that child labor was being stopped but many families relied on the extra income that their children brought in to keep the family alive, such as Jurgis's family's case. It was overall a great thing, especially for children, but it also caused many families to struggle. There are pros and cons to every decision.

Chapter 7
The book takes a total turn to a sad and depressing mood. A time that supposed to be filled with lots of love and joy, a time Jurgis and Ona have been dreaming of, their wedding comes but turns out to be just more trouble for them and leaving them more in debt.

"They had opened their hearts, like flowers to the springtime, and the merciless winter had fallen upon them. They wondered if ever any love that had blossomed in the world had been so crushed and trampled!"

The author even adds this simile to describe their situation and their feelings. It does seem that they have faced the worst possible circumstances, but things get worse from there. Dede Antanas dies and winter comes to make things worse and worse.

Chapters 8 & 9

At the beginning of chapter eight, immediately the reader is delved into the new found love between Marija and Tamoszius. As one can imagine the pair, a big burly woman and this puny little man, they are quite an unconventional pair. But, hey, love is love. The description of their courtship is quite bubbly. They blush and are jealous of one another, as young lovers are, and they plan on being married quite soon. This relationship is seemingly beneficial not only to Marija, but also to the entirety of the family in more than one way as well.

"There was no place to entertain company except in the kitchen, in the midst of the family, and Tamoszius would sit there with his hat between his knees, never saying more than half a dozen words at the time, and turning red in the face before he managed to say those, until finally Jurgis would clap him upon the back, in his hearty way, cryring, 'Come now, brother, give us a tune.' And then Tamoszius's face would light up and he would get out his fiddle, tuck it under his chin, and play."

"There were other benefits accruing to Marija from this friendship- benefits of a more substantial nature. People paid Tamoszius big money to come and make music on state occasions..."

All of Marija's good fortune unfortunately receives a hard blow suddenly. The factory in which she paints cans shuts down, and she loses her job. This only begins to go into the description of the unsteady working conditions that all of the factory workers in the town are under. It seems that all of the workers are living under subjection to their job, almost as if they had unknowingly sold their souls to the meat packing industry. Jurgis would go to work at 7 A.M. sharp, if one minute late, and hour's pay was docked. During the bone chilling winter months, the workers would have to wait hours to even begin working, and those lost hours without pay or benefit to them. The hours that they did get were never sure. Sometimes they would be working until four in the evening, and sometimes it would be one in the morning. 

These conditions led the family to join the workers union for the meat packing factories. This effort jump-started a swelling of pride in the family's freedom. They were just now realizing what it meant to have rights. Jurgis makes a comparison between the union and the Gospel:

"He forgot how he himself had been blind, a short time ago- after the fashion of all crusaders since the original ones, who set out to spread the gospel of Brotherhood by force of arms."

Jurgis's great splurge of pride gives him a desire of more. He becomes a citizen of the United States, and he also is paid two dollars to vote. He begins to take some classes at a night school where he learns to read a little and speak English. All of these happenings cause him to reflect on his past in Lithuania concerning politics under the Russian empire. 

The mention of the cesspool dubbed "Bubbly Creek" leads to the abhorring descriptions of the terrible health conditions concerning the factory workers of Packingtown. Despite the factory's "government inspectors", unmentionable actions do take place. Rancid,diseased meat is used. Many products were made chemically, not even containing the said meats they were even supposed to be. The health of the workers was unimaginable. Chemicals would deteriorate their skin away; fingernails would be eaten away; rheumatism would cause a man to be bedridden; blood poisoning was a major issue; backs would be bent out of shape; men would even fall into vats of boiling water.

Obviously, this industry was not the most desirable field of work, but the workers were under the spell of this job, and no matter what they did, they could not get away from it. 

Chapters 4 and 5

In chapters four and five, their perspective of the American Dream changes. Chapter four starts off with the family looking to buy a home to own instead of to pay rent. Chapter five explains that it was hard to find jobs and once they did, they were surprised at what was behind the doors.

"He would not have Ona working- he was not that sort of man, he said, and she was not that sort of woman. It would be a strange thing if a man like him could not support the family, with the help of the board of Jonas and Marija. He would not even hear of letting his children go to work-there were schools here in America for children, Jurgis had heard, to which they could go for nothing,"

Men were very prideful then. Jurgis could not stand the thought if Ona or the children going to work because he felt that he, the man of the house, should be able to go to work and provide for his family on his own. Jurgis says that he is not that sort of man and Ona is not that sort of woman. It is somewhat the same as current times because even though women can work, and do anything that a man can do, the man of the house feels that is his responsibility to take care of his family and be able to provide.

"'If there is anything wrong, do not give him the money, but go out and get a lawyer.' It was an agonizing moment, but she sat in the chair, her hands clenched like death, and made a fearful effort, summoning all her powers, and gasped out her purpose."

This passage includes a simile. It uses like to compare her clenched hands to death to emphasize how she feels.

" One of the first problems that Jurgis ran upon was that of the unions. He had no experience with unions, and he had to have it explained to him that the men were banded together for the purpose of fighting for their rights."

Unions are organizations within a work base that are trying to better the economy. Jurgis had a problem with them because although they promise a higher pay for those who want to join but they also lower profit.

"This floor was filthy, yet they set Antanas with his mop slopping the "pickle" into a hole that connected with a sink, where it was caught and used over again forever; and if 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!"

The working conditions were very unsanitary and were till recently. The meat packing industry had many problems concerning working conditions of the workers and what the meat actually consisted of.

Chapters 2 & 3

The chapters of two and three are quite descriptive in relation to the setting. It also describes how Jurgis and Ona and their families came together: Jurgis met Ona at a horse fair. The former homeland of the characters introduced in chapter one is a rural area in Lithuania. It was a lush, forested area. They had been intoxicated by the idea of the American Dream.

"Jurgis, too, had heard of America. That was a country where, they said, a man might earn three rubles a day, and  Jurgis figured what three rubles a day would mean, with prices as they were where he lived, and decided forthwith that h would go to America and marry, and be a rich man in the bargain. In that country, rich or poor, a man was free, it was said; he did not have to go into the army, he did not have to pay out his money to rascally officials- he might do as he pleased, and count himself as good as any other man."

Upon the party's arrival in America, they were destined for Chicago because this is where a friend of Jonas had gotten rich- in a stockyard, but along the way they came across a few problems, being as they were foreigners in a completely new world. This particular destination was probably not the ideal location for the American Dream. It was crowded, smelly, dirty, and quite a disturbing place to live- most likely the complete opposite of what the group had in mind. The intense change in the setting on the train ride to the town dubbed Packingtown is described:

"A full hour before the party reached the city they had begun to note the perplexing changes in the atmosphere. It grew darker all the time, and upon the earth the grass seemed to grow less green. Every minute, as the train sped on, the colors of things became dingier; the fields were  grown parched and yellow, the landscape hideous and bare. And along with the thickening smoke they began to notice another circumstance, a strange, pungent odor."

A new found family friend, Jokubas, a native also of Lithuania, gives the whole group a tour of the whole slaughtering process. The said process is quite gruesome, in fact. While Jurgis is witnessing the slaughter of hogs, a deep feeling of concern is running through his mind, as he wonders how the killing of these seemingly individual and self-willed animals is justifiable. He compares each hog to an individual, as a person, basically. He describes their dignity, their heart's desire, their hope. Each had their mind made up that nothing would interfere, but then comes Fate in the form of the slaughter, swooping down without any respect to who they are. It hits the readers' hearts because the narrator personifies the hogs in a deep, human-like way, hoping that there is basically "hog heaven" for these innocent creatures.

It also mentions the long list of products developed by these factories. Every part of the animal is utilized for many different uses such as glue, buttons, lard, etc.

Chapter 1

In chapter 1, we meet a lot of new characters at the wedding feast, or veselija, held for Ona and Jurgis in Chicago. The characters are Lithuanian and the feast is held according to Lithuanian customs. The author seems to focus a lot on the music played in this chapter, and although the musicians aren't that great everyone seems to enjoy the music played, but he particularly went int great detail describing Tamoszius.

"Now and then one leaps up with a cry and calls for this song or that, and then the fire leaps brighter in Tamoszius's eyes, and he flings up his fiddle and shouts to his companions, and away they go in mad career."

This passage is just one of the few in this chapter that go to describing the music played. The way Sinclair describes Tamoszius reminds me much of the Tasmanian Devil. He is small and full of life and spreads energy and wildness into everyone around him, but he does so through music. He is almost like a puppeteer and he controls the other people in the room by using the energy of his music.

Despite the whole veselija being held to Lithuanian customs down to the music, the people all dance to their own liking. People do the dance that the prefer to any song. This is somewhat of a symbol of the freedom that the Lithuanian people receive by moving to America. Some people pick up American style dances but some stick to tradition.

Sinclair uses many different ways to really describe the characters and he does so in such great detail. He calls Marija a horse and we see this broad muscular woman that carries meat cans all day. In describing the characters in chapter 1, we get bits and pieces of what this book is going to be about, the meat industry.

The veselija is like a representation of socialistic ideas in this time. The idea that everyone helps out and contributes what they can to try and get the poor out of the hole they are in. The link above is a link to Socialism in America. On this site it states:
"Socialism is the belief and the hope that by proper use of government power, men can be rescued from their helplessness in the wild cycling cruelty of depression and boom."
This concept is much the same as acziavimas in this novel. Teta Elzbieta is like the government saying that each person must give what they can. "he finds himself face to face with Teta Elzbieta who holds the hat. Into it he drops a sum of money-a dollar... The guests are expected to pay for this entertainment." Each person gave what they could afford to give in return the got a dance with the bride. The small donations from each person helped to pay for the vesilja helping Jurgis and Ona out. With this in mind Socialism made little fixes that resulted in helping everyone. Like Socialism, there was no private property and Teta (the government) took up small funds to distrubute it to the poor to help.