The Jungle

For the last several chapters, Sinclair has not spoken of the slaughterhouses. Why?

The Jungle, Chapter 24

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These final chapters of The Jungle shows a shift in Sinclair’s narrative technique. From Chapter Two until Chapter Twenty-Eight, Sinclair uses a narrative arc, mostly of the demise of Jurgis and his family. This arc ends in Chapter Twenty-Eight and Twenty-Nine with Jurgis’s conversion to Socialism: an emacipation from the Capitalist meat plants. The remaining chapters of the novel move from a narrative to an explanatory style of writing. Sinclair uses the final chapters to explain the tenets and the merits of socialism to his reading audience. Scholars and critics have not always approved of this technique since it abandons the Naturalist mode of writing Sinclair established in the rest of the novel.