The Last Pages
If you have wondered why The Jungle ends with a rally, not a funeral, I counted the pages for you.
Short answer for Upton Sinclair’s book: Jurgis does not die. His wife and son do, earlier. He ends the novel as a hotel porter and a convert to Socialism, standing in a crowded hall while a speaker shouts that Chicago will be ours. This video spoils the whole last third.
I’ll give you the plot of the final chapters, the counts, and my reading, which I label as opinion.
What I Read
I read the Project Gutenberg text, ebook number one hundred and forty, thirty-one chapters. The ending I cover here is the last nine chapters, twenty-three to thirty-one, which is where Jurgis comes back to Chicago, falls to the bottom, and finds a cause. I read chapter thirty-one in full. Some of the long lectures I summarize, because they run for pages.
Back to Chicago
At the start of chapter twenty-three, Jurgis comes back to Chicago in the fall after a summer on the road. He has fifteen dollars hidden in a shoe. It is the winter that undoes him. He sleeps in parks and ten-cent lodging houses, and drinks every hour or two so that he does not freeze.
The book spells out what this does to him. He sees the world as a place where nothing counts but brutal might, and all of life as one colossal prison, with bars wherever he turns.
Then he comes across a drunk young man named Freddie Jones, who takes him home to a mansion and presses a hundred-dollar bill on him. A butler kicks Jurgis down the front steps into the snow.
Now he has a bill nobody will change for a ragged tramp. He finally hands it to a bartender, who pockets it, pours a glass of beer, and counts out ninety-five cents. When Jurgis asks for the rest of his hundred, the man calls him nutty. Jurgis throws a glass, and is arrested. The sentence is suspended.
The Machine
Jurgis finds Jack Duane, his old cellmate, and they rob a man in the dark. His share is fifty-five dollars and some change. The newspaper next day says the victim, an insurance agent, had a concussion and might lose three fingers to the cold. Then a night watchman named Harper brings him into politics, for a salary, to work for Mike Scully.
Scully’s candidate wins the election. Months later the beef strike comes, and he stays at his job as a strikebreaker on Scully’s advice. At the end of chapter twenty-six he has nearly three hundred dollars.
Then one night, drunk, he walks into a dark room and finds Connor. He does to Connor what he did before. This time Scully will not help. Jurgis takes a dollar and fourteen cents and gets on a streetcar.
Outcast
Chapter twenty-seven is the lowest. Jurgis is afraid of his old friends, starving, and eating stale bread at half price. One night he slips into a rally for a senator, falls asleep, and gets thrown out into the rain.
He begs from a well-dressed lady and recognizes her. She was the belle of his wedding feast. She gives him an address, because she knows where Marija is.
Marija is in a house, in a kimono, and she says it plainly. She took the work after getting sick, because she could not see the children starve. Stanislovas, she says, is dead. Rats killed him, in an oil factory where he had been locked in overnight.
The Hall
At the end of chapter twenty-seven the police raid the house, and Jurgis is swept up with the rest. In chapter twenty-eight a judge hears that he was looking for his sister, advises him dryly to keep her in a better place, and lets him go. Marija gives him a quarter and tells him to go home to Elzbieta.
Instead, with a full stomach and nowhere to sleep, he walks into a hall, because there is a stream of people going in and it must be free. He tries to stay awake. A woman beside him says, gently, that if he would try to listen, comrade, he might be interested.
He is startled that anyone calls him comrade. He looks at the speaker, a gaunt man with a thin black beard and a deep voice, who talks about the millions who have no voice. Jurgis is gripped.
The Man Born Again
After the speech the crowd sings the Marseillaise. The text says a new man has been born in Jurgis. He thinks he is free, even if he begs and starves, because now he will understand it.
Jurgis cannot leave without finding the man who spoke, and in chapter twenty-nine he does. Someone introduces him to Ostrinski, a Polish tailor of about fifty who speaks Lithuanian, and Ostrinski takes him home.
All that night Ostrinski explains the party. He explains the packers, which the book calls the Beef Trust, and he describes a dream: the people of Packingtown marching in and taking over the stockyards, to produce food for human beings and not fortunes for pirates. Jurgis lies on the kitchen floor and cannot sleep.
The Hotel
Chapter thirty. Jurgis goes home to Elzbieta and, for once, he does not have to plead. He starts to tell her about Socialism, but the text says her armor is impervious to it, and that she is a wonderfully wise little woman who can think of nothing but the family.
A week later he walks into a small hotel and asks for work. The job is cleaning floors, washing spittoons and carrying trunks, thirty dollars a month and board. When he tells Ostrinski, the tailor says, not Hinds’s. It is, and Tommy Hinds is a Socialist.
The Dinner
Chapter thirty-one opens with Marija. Jurgis visits her, with a job in hand, and says she can leave. She says no. She cannot keep her past a secret, and she takes dope, and will stay until she dies. The book does not rescue her.
At home, Elzbieta is sick a good deal now and the boys are wild. But Jurgis sticks by the family, and plunges into the movement when things go wrong.
The rest of the chapter is mostly a long conversation. On the night before the election, a millionaire named Fisher invites Jurgis and a friend to meet an editor, Maynard, who writes against Socialism. Schliemann, a former philosophy professor, and Lucas, an ex-evangelist, argue in front of him.
When the editor asks what two Socialists agree on, they settle on two points. The first is common ownership and democratic management of the means of producing what people need. The second is that the way to get there is the political organization of wage-earners as a class.
Lucas says the Bible and Jesus belong to the poor. Schliemann says the system wastes more than it builds, from advertising to adulterated food. He quotes a government official who puts the loss from adulterated food at a billion and a quarter dollars a year.
He also pictures what it would be like after the revolution, with machines washing dishes and a small hour of work. The book does not make fun of him, and does not hide how odd it sounds.
Election Night
Next, Jurgis and the hotel staff go to a big hall. The returns come in on a telegraph. The Socialist vote is over four hundred thousand, an increase of about three hundred and fifty percent in four years.
In Packingtown, the vote was five hundred in the spring of nineteen oh three, sixteen hundred that fall, and over sixty-three hundred a year later. The Democrats got eighty-eight hundred.
An orator who used to run the relief bureau in the stockyards cries that the men who voted for them are not Socialists yet. Organize, he says. Organize. Organize. Then he cries, three times, that Chicago will be ours, and the book ends.
What Does Not Happen
It helps to list what the ending refuses to give you. Connor is never punished in the story. The packers are never broken up. Marija is not saved, and nobody brings Ona back.
The pure food question does appear, but only as dinner conversation. At the settlement house, the host plans to steer the talk to pure food because the editor is interested in it. It comes up as one more waste of competition, not as the main event.
That surprised me. After twenty-eight chapters of lard, spoiled meat and sausage, the book’s final answer is not a cleaner factory. It is a vote.
Counting the Ending
Now my counts, from the chapter text only. The words Socialist, Socialists and Socialism appear sixty-eight times. Sixty-three of them are in chapters twenty-nine, thirty and thirty-one, about eleven percent of the book. Before chapter twenty-nine, there are five.
The word jungle itself appears once, in chapter twenty-two, and it has nothing to do with the stockyards.
My Reading
This part is opinion. The novel ends with a promise, not a rescue. Ona, Antanas and Stanislovas are gone, Marija stays in the house, and Elzbieta is sick. Jurgis has a job, a cause and a crowd.
I think that is the point. The book spends twenty-eight chapters showing that one strong man cannot beat the machine. The last three show the only answer it offers: the many, together, and a ballot.
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