The American Dream In Upton Sinclair's The Jungle

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In Upton Sinclairs The Jungle we are forced to see the sturggles of a Lithuanian family as they try so desperatly to achieve the "American Dream" while leaving the country and people they knew behind. They entered a world that was painted over as a life of modern homes with fenced yards and happy little families with plastered on smiles standing in the window. They failed to peel back the paint and to see beyond the fake smiles at all the struggles and death they would face as there American dream shifted to a fight of pure survival embeded with the author's own views of the Socialist party twisted and hinted in through out the book. Starting off in the begining we are put in a time of joy and happiness as some of the main characters, Jurgis …show more content…
In the factory walls they imagined and though for just a brief second they would conquer this jungle of a world which was now there new home. Unfortunately reality has a way of rearing it's ugly head when walking two miles each way to work, fourteen plus hours a day doing back breaking labor for less than two dollars a day becomes your new normal. They tried for as long as they could to hold out the hope of a brighter tomorrow but the winter still came and the kids were still hungry and no job was ever safe or promised so they soon acknowledged the fate that this was all they would ever become. Nothing more no matter how hard they tried (pg. 155). It was also soon found out that justice was something you didn't get unless you had two things: money and power not even if your wife let a man take advantage of her on the promise that this would make it better(pg. 167-169). Jurgis fights so hard to give his family a fighting chance but in his pursuit of this "American Dream" it slips right through his fingers and he turns to a life on his own leaving the city and finding his freedom in the country where he can push aside his memories and focus on just himself all the while spending the money he was once using to build his dreams on the posion drink which he tried to use to fill the void that was now his
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