111 pages • 3 hours read
Upton SinclairThe Jungle
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1905A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 22-26Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary
Maria explains that Antanas must have fallen off the sidewalk into the flooded street below and drowned. Jurgis silently leaves the house and then keeps walking until he reaches a railroad crossing. As a train passes, he impulsively jumps into one of the cars. Throughout the night, Jurgis “[fights] a battle with his soul […] he had not wept, and he would not—not a tear! It was past and over, and he was done with it; he would fling it off his shoulders, be free of it, the whole business, that night” (239).
By morning, Jurgis is well outside Chicago. Overjoyed to be back in the countryside, he hops off the train and walks until he comes to a farmhouse. Here, he buys some breakfast, which he eats beside a stream before bathing and dozing off. That evening, he approaches another farmer, who refuses to serve him; in retaliation, Jurgis pulls up some of his newly planted trees. He then finds another farmhouse, where he pays for dinner and a night’s shelter. His host offers to hire Jurgis, but he declines, explaining that he doesn’t want to have to look for a new job when winter comes.
Jurgis passes the next several months in much the same way; he forages for food, sleeps in fields or deserted buildings, and occasionally takes an odd job chopping wood. He soon learns that there are many other men making their living as “professional tramps”: “[T]he vast majority of them had been workingmen, had fought the long fight as Jurgis had, and found that it was a losing fight, and given up” (245). By July, Jurgis reaches Missouri, where he joins in some seasonal harvesting work, only to spend his entire earnings carousing—something he later regrets.
One night, Jurgis seeks shelter from the rain in the home of a young family of Belarussian immigrants. Unable to bear the sight of the couple’s infant son, he rushes back onto the road in tears.
Chapter 23 Summary
Jurgis returns to Chicago in the fall, having saved enough money to last two months without pay. After roughly a month, he gets a job digging tunnels for what he believes will be telephone lines. In reality, the tunnels are a scheme to break the power of the teamsters’ union by providing an alternate means of transporting freight.
Jurgis is now doing comparatively well financially, but since he has few places to go besides the shared room he rents, he ends up spending much of his time and money drinking at saloons. One day, he is struck by a freight car while on the job and sent to the hospital. Although he is released two weeks later, his arm hasn’t healed enough for him to return to work.
For six days, Jurgis largely keeps out of the cold by spending what little money he has left in saloons. Soon, Jurgis has no choice but to begin begging for money. He finds himself in competition with people who know tricks that he does not: “[A]las! it was again the case of the honest merchant who finds that the genuine and unadulterated article is driven to the wall by the artistic counterfeit” (259).
Chapter 24 Summary
One night while Jurgis is begging, he approaches a wealthy-looking young man. The man, who is very drunk, commiserates with Jurgis, claiming to be poor himself; his name, he reveals, is Freddie Jones. Freddie insists that Jurgis come home with him for a meal and pulls out a wad of cash to pay for a cab. Jurgis debates grabbing the money and running but misses the opportunity. Entrusting him with a $100-bill, Freddie puts the rest away.
Jurgis hails a cab. Half an hour later, the men arrive at an enormous mansion on the lakefront, where Freddie rings to be let inside: “Jurgis's heart was beating wildly. It was a bold thing for him to do. Into what strange unearthly place he was venturing he had no idea. Aladdin entering his cave could not have been more excited” (266).
Although it’s clear the servants want to remove Jurgis, Freddie insists on showing him an immense, ornate dining room. As Freddie babbles about the house and his family, Jurgis suddenly realizes that he’s the son of Jones the meatpacking baron. Freddie orders the butler to bring food and drink and then leads Jurgis to his rooms, which are equally opulent: “There were lounging chairs and sofas, window-seats covered with soft cushions of fantastic designs; there was one corner fitted in Persian fashion, with a huge canopy and a jeweled lamp beneath” (270).
The servants bring up a meal of sandwiches, fresh fruit, cakes, and champagne, and Freddie encourages Jurgis to eat his fill. After talking for a while, Freddie falls asleep. At this point, the butler reenters and orders Jurgis to leave; he follows Jurgis downstairs and tries to search him before simply turning Jurgis outside, kicking him as he does.
Chapter 25 Summary
Jurgis debates how to use the money Freddie gave him without arousing suspicion. He ultimately takes it to a saloon-keeper, offering to pay him if he’ll change the money. However, when Jurgis hands over the bill, the saloon-keeper pretends he only handed him a single dollar for beer, pocketing the rest. A fight breaks out, and Jurgis is arrested.
In court the following day, Jurgis tries to explain how he came by $100 but is sentenced to ten days in prison. On his second day in Bridewell, he stumbles across Jack Duane who invites him to visit after they’re both released. When Jurgis does, Duane explains that he’s looking for an accomplice. That same night, Jurgis helps him ambush and rob a wealthy passerby.
Jurgis quickly tires of being Jack’s accomplice, so Jack introduces him to the “high-class criminal world of Chicago” (284)—the saloon and gambling-house keepers and brothel owners who operate with the tacit approval of the legal system, in exchange for helping the political and economic elite remain in power. On one occasion, Jurgis receives an inside tip on a horse race in exchanging for beating a man up.
Looking for a less risky form of criminal enterprise, Jurgis reconnects with Bush Harper. An associate of Scully’s, Harper recruits Jurgis to help throw an election to the Republican candidate. Jurgis’s role is to take a job in the stockyards and ensure his fellow workers vote Republican.
Thanks to a letter from Scully, Jurgis is able to find a job trimming hogs. Having done so, he reconnects with several old friends and helps establish a Republican presence in the community, campaigning heavily as the election approaches. On the day of the vote itself, he employs a variety of illegal tactics, like paying voters or helping them vote more than once, to ensure that the Republican candidate wins.
Chapter 26 Summary
After the election, Jurgis keeps his job at the meatpacking factory in the hopes of future political gigs. Meanwhile, unrest is bubbling up in the meatpackers’ unions. When Jones responds to their demands by lowering their wages, the union decides to go on strike. Hoping to capitalize on the situation, Jurgis visits Scully. To his surprise, Scully advises him to work as a strikebreaker, telling him the company will reward him for his loyalty.
Jurgis accordingly returns to the stockyards, leveraging his willingness to work for higher wages. Since many foremen are taking part in the strike, Jurgis soon finds himself promoted. The new position is difficult, since the men who have been brought in as strikebreakers lack meatpacking experience. However, Jurgis soon learns he can supplement his income by requiring laborers to pay him off to overlook offenses they would normally be fired for.
As meat supplies run low and public opinion turns against the meatpacking companies, they offer to settle. However, when the strikers reapply for employment, the superintendent passes over anyone who is a union leader. This enrages the other union members, who immediately return to their strike. The situation in Packingtown becomes even more volatile as a result, with fights frequently breaking out between the strikers and the strikebreakers. Meanwhile, the company provides the strikebreakers with a variety of perks—like women, alcohol, and gambling—that only exacerbate the district’s violence and corruption.
One night, as Jurgis returns home from an evening’s carousing, he stumbles across Connor. Jurgis’s temper gets the better of him, and he once again attacks him. After being arrested, Jurgis sends word to Harper, but when Harper learns that the man he beat up was Connor, he says he can't help him; Connor is one of Scully’s right-hand men. Harper eventually arranges for the bail to be reduced to $300. He advises Jurgis to post bond and then flee.
Chapters 22-26 Analysis
Although The Jungle generally uses the plight of meatpacking workers to illustrate the problems with capitalism more broadly, there are certain aspects of capitalism that cannot be easily represented in this way. In these chapters, Sinclair therefore takes a step back from life in Packingtown and explores some of these issues: the string of adventures and misadventures that befall Jurgis in this section all speak to different features of the capitalist system.
In part because the development of modern capitalism coincided with the Industrial Revolution, capitalism is often associated with urbanization and city life. However, as Chapter 22 demonstrates, capitalism’s rise also impacted America’s rural areas, particularly its agricultural workers. Because of the work’s seasonal nature, these laborers are easily drawn into what Sinclair, quoting Marx, calls the “surplus labour army of society; called into being under the stern system of Nature to do the casual work of the world, the tasks which were transient and irregular, and yet which had to be done” (246). In other words, The Jungle suggests that it is a built-in feature of capitalism that some workers be chronically under- or unemployed. These workers can be called upon to supply temporary or seasonal work, and they help keep wages low by ensuring that there will always be competition for the jobs available.
Jurgis’s return to Chicago brings other issues to the foreground. His chance encounter with Freddie Jones provides a glimpse into the extravagant wealth of the meatpacking barons. Sinclair describes the Jones’s mansion in lavish detail, implicitly juxtaposing them with the poverty of Packingtown and making the latter seem all the more inexcusable. Freddie’s apparent ignorance of his own fortune—for instance, his repeated complaints that he is poor—further underscores the contrast.
To a much lesser degree, Jurgis gets a taste of this opulence after becoming involved with Chicago’s criminal ring. Although it is clear throughout the novel that the city’s government and political parties are corrupt, Chapters 25 and 26 provide an inside look at the way business interests have captured the democratic system and bound it to various illicit and illegal activities, like gambling and prostitution. As Sinclair explains, those engaged in such activities make ideal political operatives, because of the leverage that the legal system has over them:
All of these agencies of corruption were banded together, and leagued in blood brotherhood with the politician and the police; more often than not they were one and the same person—the police captain would own the brothel he pretended to raid, and the politician would open his headquarters in his saloon (285).
The relationship between the meatpacking barons and the political system becomes yet another example of capitalism’s tendency to debase whatever it touches in its pursuit of profit. Jurgis himself falls victim to this kind of moral degradation after becoming caught up in the system. It is not simply that he participates in the corruption, but rather that doing so changes his character for the worse. Here, for instance, is Sinclair’s description of Jurgis’s mood and behavior during the strike:
He had gotten used to being a master of men; and because of the stifling heat and the stench, and the fact that he was a ‘scab’ and knew it and despised himself, he was drinking, and developing a villainous temper, and he stormed and cursed and raged at his men (310).
The Jungle suggests that even “success” within the capitalist system is a kind of loss, because it necessarily comes at the cost of one’s morals and self-respect.
