The Jungle (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) Read Online Free PDF Page A

could be that Sinclair was also attempting to keep the reader mindful that Jurgis’s is not a unique story, that he is a representative figure, standing in for thousands like him. And perhaps Sinclair did not want to individualize Jurgis, to allow his story to fall into the category of the bourgeois novel or the bildungsroman (novel of education), in which a man’s fate is mostly in his own hands, a matter of character and self-knowledge, rather than determined by economic and institutional forces. In this regard Sinclair’s socialist perspective intersects with that of Naturalist writers such as Emile Zola, George Gissing, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane. Focusing on the effects of environment and heredity on behavior, as distinct from personal history or psychological characterization, the Naturalists held to a pessimistic materialist determinism. Naturalism, according to Malcolm Cowley in an essay entitled, “Not Men: A Natural History of American Naturalism,” is “not what we have learned to call literature ‘in depth’ ”; it concerns itself with what can be observed rather than what takes place unseen, internally. After fifty years of American novels of interior life, the limited interiority of Sinclair’s novel may be what is most foreign to contemporary readers.
    One last turn of the screw: Perhaps the reason we get relatively little exposure to Jurgis’s thoughts and feelings beyond “Dieve, I’m glad I’m not a hog,” is that Sinclair believes that it is only after Jurgis discovers socialism, after his conversion experience, that he finds the key to understanding his life, the ability to reflect on what he sees, to put two and two together, to recognize feelings as his own. In this interpretation, socialism not only removes the scales from his eyes but finally enables him to attach meaning to the world.

Conclusion
    The Jungle now holds a secure place in the American literary canon. It has never gone out of print since its original publication; it is taught regularly in high schools and colleges; and it generates its share of scholarly and critical study. Its stature is attributed by some to the remarkable documentary value of the text, its painstaking accuracy. For others, the book’s importance will forever be justified by its social impact, particularly its role in the establishment of the federal Food and Drug Administration. For some literary critics, the book’s primary significance is as a representative of the socialist novel or the muckraking novel or the American version of the Naturalist school of writing. The Jungle has not, however, generally been given credit as a great work of literature; it is often chided by critics for the propagandistic tone of its second half. It is interesting to note Sinclair’s own reaction to this charge, which was leveled against many of his novels. He has no interest in refuting it, or in pointing out the literary merits of his prose; rather, he embraces the charge, asking, in so many words, “What’s wrong with propaganda?” He writes:
    The Standard Dictionary defines propaganda as: “Effort directed systematically toward the gaining of support for an opinion or course of action.” This, you note, contains no suggestion of reprobation. Propaganda may be either good or bad, according to the nature of the teaching and the motives of the teacher.... it gives a painful wrench to be told that there are moral excellences and heroic splendors in the souls of unwashed and unbeautiful workingmen. We resent such ideas, and likewise the persons who persist in forcing them into our minds; which explains why all orthodox critics agree that Jesus and Tolstoi are propagandists, while Shakespeare and Goethe are pure and unsullied creative artists. Such distinction between “art” and “propaganda” is purely a class distinction and a class weapon; itself a piece of ruling-class propaganda, a means of duping the minds of men, and keeping them enslaved to