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Your central idea is broad but workable. The quotes that you have identified are evidence to your argument that the setting makes the characters miserable. The book portrays the object poverty, harsh working conditions and often dangerous and unsanitary living conditions. You need to be a bit more specific in defining what constituted misery for these characters. Why were they miserable? For example, how did the fact that many families had to share one bathroom facility add to the misery of their lives? Try to imagine 20 or more individuals using one toilet would be like. The smells, the cleanliness, the lack of privacy and simple logistics of so many just needing to use the facilities and having to wait. How did the inability to speak English affect the immigrants ability to function in that society? To gain employment, purchase homes, rent apartments, buy necessary goods? How did long hours of work with little to no time off impact the lives of the families? Imagine how these immigrants must have felt in giving up all they knew and everything they own to travel to America; believing the streets to be paved with gold, only to encounter tremendous poverty and hardship. Why did this add to the feeling of hopelessness and despair? This was also a period when social welfare programs were not in existence to aid those in poverty. Examine how and why this contributed to the hardship and compare and contrast it to toady where many programs exist to help the impoverished and underprivileged. These are some examples of how you can go into depth and analyze what these characters experienced and use the quotes from the book to support your arguments. One further example might be: Working long hours in the factories, sometimes 12-14 hours per day was exhausting. Especially, when having to face the extreme heat of summer or bitter cold of winter. To complicate matters, the poor living conditions of the tenements did not offer any relief to an exhausted worker and made rest and sleep difficult, if not impossible to achieve and made the next working day harder to face. Then you can refer to a quote in the book that supports this paragraph. I am sure that by narrowing your focus on the types of misery and hazards faced by the characters in the home, on the job, in the streets that you will find plenty to due a credible job in writing your essay. Do not forget to writing a concluding paragraph that summarizes your argument, evidence and what you have learned. Good luck!!!

I have 60 pages left to read of The Jungle, so...it's pretty fresh in my mind. 1) A very fast read. 2) No. It's not gross. It won't make you consider being a vegetarian because it's not graphic. 3) Yes, Sinclair does describe how the pigs are killed, but, again, it's not graphic. 4) You might want to read something else if you're "super sensitive." I have the feeling you couldn't handle this book.

The Jungle is a book of social criticism. It criticizes the corruption of power in the meat packing industry and just how industries work as a whole, so it is asking for change to that aspect of society. It says that the conditions are terrible for workers so that needs to be changed. Basically, "wage slavery" should be banned by providing better working conditions, hours, and pay for immigrants and the working class. The whole point of the book is to criticize the industry, calling for change.

You're on the right track. Give working conditions on what was going on and quotes from people during that time. I think that you've got the paper all in your brain, it's just a matter of how you are going to put it down on paper. Don't think too much about it.