The jungle

In these great american novels there always seems to be a reoccuring theme. In my last blog post, as a matter of fact, I talked about another reoccurring theme, the American Dream. The American dream was in three of the books we read so I felt it was really important to include that in one of my blogs. Something I noticed in the Jungle is that one of the themes in the book is extremely similar to a theme in the Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck. When reading grapes of wrath, the Joad family undergoes a lot of obstacles and most of the joads fight through them together and work really well as a family. The one problem is when the going gets tough, some of these members of the family drop out and run away, meaning they can’t handle these difficulties. Just like the characters in Grapes of Wrath, Jonas, one of the characters in The Jungle, was close with Jurgis and the family until Jurgis sprained his ankle. It’s not like he stopped liking Jurgis after that he just was unable to tolerate the misery, so he disappeared and left the family. The pay wasn’t great and the working conditions were terrible as well and a lot of people were getting sick so he decided to run away. It relates because as I mentioned earlier with the Grapes of Wrath, when the going gets tough some peoples main option is to just run away and to never be seen again. That’s exactly what they did and that’s exactly what Jonas did, he couldn’t handle it.