"The Jungle" is Upton Sinclair's call to arms against capitalism, an exploitative ideology that has laid ruin to the Chicago meatpacking district where the novel's main protagonist, Jurgis immigrates to with his family from Lithuania. Jurgis is subject to countless atrocities throughout the novel which facilitate Sinclair's blowing critique of capitalism. In this way, Jurgis is not only a tool in the machine of capitalism, but also ironically an instrument employed by the author to highlight the exogenous demands put on the proletariat in the capitalist system. During each phase of the book, Jurgis's status as immigrant and working man allow his persona to endure the necessary transformation that will lead him to his acceptance of socialism at the book's closure. While this technique helps the author to achieve his ultimate political espousal of socialism, Jurgis remains an everyman, a type, rather than an individual character with depth and development.
Jurgis plays the role of the everyman- he embodies the struggles of the proletariat who is exploited by capitalism- these struggles range from being laid off, injured on the job, reduced to begging to losing his wife and family to rape and death. Every chapter in the book is chalk full of horrible events that little room is left for actual consideration of the characters. As such, the reader learns from Jurgis the ways in which capitalism stifles the working class. Upton Sinclair strategically subjects Jurgis to the atrocities he suffers in the novel to highlight the exogenous demands put on the working man, or proletariat, by the capitalist system. .
These demands are developed through three courses of the book, the first in which Jurgis is innocent to the true character of capitalism, willingly accepting of his role in the sphere of production as a worker in the factory and the sphere of circulation, as a consumer whose needs for shelter and food are mediated by monetary exchange.
