Essay title: The Jungle Review

When Jurgis finds out that Ona’s boss was raping her, he finds the man and starts to fight him. He is thrown in prison and given a 30 day sentence. This is especially terrible for the family because Jurgis was a main money maker and having him unable to work for such a long period of time was going to be extremely difficult for them.

By the time Jurgis gets out of prison, they had lost the house. He finds his family only to discover that his wife was in labor. Ona and the baby end up dying. This is devastating to Jurgis, but he keeps on going for the sake of his first son.

He finds a good job, and is doing well, when he comes home from work one day to find that his son had drown in a freak accident. It put Jurgis over the edge and he turned to drinking and became a recluse. He left the city and looked for work on farms, but when winter came there was no more work to be found on farms, so he returned to the city. Jurgis was thrown in jail again when he was introduced to the criminal world. Once he got out, he began mugging, stealing, and using political elections to make money. He would go with immigrants into the polls and tell them who to vote for, and in exchange, he was paid a good sum of money.

Jurgis was making more money by cheating and being dishonest then he ever could have imagined making by being hard working and honest. The highlife ends when he again beats up the man who raped his wife. As is turned out, this man was good friends with Jurgis’s boss in the political graft, so Jurgis was advised to leave town. He was back to begging for money and jobs. Then, one day, in order to get out of the cold, Jurgis sits in a socialist political meeting. He begins listening to the speaker and is able to relate his situation to what the man was saying.

All Jurgis had wanted was a good home and a good job to support his family, and his hard work hadn’t.