The Jungle - Exposing the Meatpacking Industry

1. In your opinion, which specific details in this excerpt most convincingly highlight problems in the meatpacking industry in the early 1900s? Why? Use specific passages and quote. Analyze at least five details. 

A.  The meat was suppose to be inspected by the government inspector, however, he let dozens of carcass of possibly tubercular pork pass right by so that they got a stamp of government approval but hadn't actually been inspected.

B. They used spoil meat. "They cleaned out the waste barrels only once a year and in the barrels would be dirt and rust and old nails and stale water and cartload after cartload of it would be taken up and dumped into the hoppers and sent out for the public's breakfast."

C. They never paid the least bit of attention to what was in the sausage. For example, "There would could all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected and that was moldy and white-it would be dosed with borax and glycerin, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption." "There would be meat that had tumbled out on the floor, in the dirt and sawdust, where the workers had tramped and spit uncounted billions of consumption germs."

D. Rats would run all over piles of stored meats and men would "sweep off hand fulls of the dried dung of rats. These rats were nuisances, and the packers would put out poisoned bread for them: they would die, and then rats, bread, and meat would go into the hoppers together. The meat would be shuffled into carts, and the man who did the shuffling would not trouble to lift out a rat even when he saw them-there were sings that went into the sausage that a poisoned rat was a tidbit."

E. "There was no place for the men to wash their hands before they ate their dinner, and so they made a practice of washing them in the water that was to be ladled into the sausage."

2. What is the overall tone of the story?

The overall tone of the story is horrified disbelief and very serious. The narrator states "this is no fairy story and no joke." He wants the reader to not only understand that there were problems in the meat packing industry but to have a complete picture in their mind of the absolutely disgusting conditions so that they couldn't just forget it.

3. Based on your reading of this excerpt, why do you think Sinclair titled his novel The Jungle?

Sinclair decided to title his novel The Jungle because the conditions were so primitive and there was such a lack of high gene and lack of enforcement of any kind of rules or regulations with men doing whatever they wanted, that it was as though the meat packing plants were jungles themselves in the city.