finished_summaries/cliffnotes/The Jungle/section_20_part_0.txt
The Jungle.chapter 21
{"name": "Chapter 21", "url": "https://web.archive.org/web/20201025054346/https://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/j/the-jungle/summary-and-analysis/chapter-21", "summary": "Jurgis spends days away from home, looking for work, fighting to stay alive. A chance meeting between Elzbieta's son and a settlement worker provides Jurgis with a letter to the superintendent of a steel mill. Because the mill is far away, Jurgis sleeps at a lodging house during the week, returning to Packingtown on the weekends. An accident at the mill forces Jurgis to miss some work but enables him to spend some time with his son. Marija and Elzbieta are both finally working. It is springtime but Jurgis is already preparing for the next winter. One Saturday, after a heavy rain, Jurgis returns home to discover that Antanas has drowned.", "analysis": "Antanas' death is the second central turning point in The Jungle. Just when Jurgis' life appears to be back on track, just when he begins to have hope for the future, fate transforms his dreams into nightmares. Antanas is another character who dies, another victim of fate. The settlement worker introduced in Chapter 21 represents a reversal of sexual politics -- for the first time, a female controls a man based on sex and economics. Her interference, although doing nothing to help the unsafe conditions in the plant, does result in a job for Jurgis. This is the complete opposite of the abusive sexual politics that Connor exercised. Although she is the first woman to exhibit a position of power, the results are still negative. Although she enables Jurgis to find a job, the job keeps him from his family; therefore, he is unable to protect his son. In fitting literary irony, Sinclair places the death of Antanas during springtime -- typically the season of new life and rebirth -- and just as Jurgis begins to have a sense of new life and a new beginning, it is literally drowned. Glossary settlement an institution in a depressed and congested neighborhood offering social services and educational and recreational activities. naively in an unaffectedly, or sometimes foolishly, simple manner; artlessly. catechism a formal series of questions; close questioning. billet a long, rectangular or cylindrical unfinished bar of iron or steel, usually smaller than 36 inches. incandescent very bright; shining brilliantly. ingot a mass of metal cast into a bar or other convenient shape."}


That was the way they did it! There was not half an hour's warning--the
works were closed! It had happened that way before, said the men, and it
would happen that way forever. They had made all the harvesting machines
that the world needed, and now they had to wait till some wore out! It
was nobody's fault--that was the way of it; and thousands of men and
women were turned out in the dead of winter, to live upon their savings
if they had any, and otherwise to die. So many tens of thousands already
in the city, homeless and begging for work, and now several thousand
more added to them!

Jurgis walked home-with his pittance of pay in his pocket, heartbroken,
overwhelmed. One more bandage had been torn from his eyes, one more
pitfall was revealed to him! Of what help was kindness and decency on
the part of employers--when they could not keep a job for him, when
there were more harvesting machines made than the world was able to buy!
What a hellish mockery it was, anyway, that a man should slave to make
harvesting machines for the country, only to be turned out to starve for
doing his duty too well!

It took him two days to get over this heart-sickening disappointment. He
did not drink anything, because Elzbieta got his money for safekeeping,
and knew him too well to be in the least frightened by his angry
demands. He stayed up in the garret however, and sulked--what was the
use of a man's hunting a job when it was taken from him before he had
time to learn the work? But then their money was going again, and little
Antanas was hungry, and crying with the bitter cold of the garret. Also
Madame Haupt, the midwife, was after him for some money. So he went out
once more.

For another ten days he roamed the streets and alleys of the huge city,
sick and hungry, begging for any work. He tried in stores and offices,
in restaurants and hotels, along the docks and in the railroad yards, in
warehouses and mills and factories where they made products that went
to every corner of the world. There were often one or two chances--but
there were always a hundred men for every chance, and his turn would not
come. At night he crept into sheds and cellars and doorways--until there
came a spell of belated winter weather, with a raging gale, and the
thermometer five degrees below zero at sundown and falling all night.
Then Jurgis fought like a wild beast to get into the big Harrison Street
police station, and slept down in a corridor, crowded with two other men
upon a single step.

He had to fight often in these days to fight for a place near the
factory gates, and now and again with gangs on the street. He found, for
instance, that the business of carrying satchels for railroad passengers
was a pre-empted one--whenever he essayed it, eight or ten men and boys
would fall upon him and force him to run for his life. They always
had the policeman "squared," and so there was no use in expecting
protection.

That Jurgis did not starve to death was due solely to the pittance the
children brought him. And even this was never certain. For one thing the
cold was almost more than the children could bear; and then they, too,
were in perpetual peril from rivals who plundered and beat them. The law
was against them, too--little Vilimas, who was really eleven, but did
not look to be eight, was stopped on the streets by a severe old lady in
spectacles, who told him that he was too young to be working and that
if he did not stop selling papers she would send a truant officer after
him. Also one night a strange man caught little Kotrina by the arm and
tried to persuade her into a dark cellar-way, an experience which filled
her with such terror that she was hardly to be kept at work.

At last, on a Sunday, as there was no use looking for work, Jurgis went
home by stealing rides on the cars. He found that they had been waiting
for him for three days--there was a chance of a job for him.

It was quite a story. Little Juozapas, who was near crazy with hunger
these days, had gone out on the street to beg for himself. Juozapas had
only one leg, having been run over by a wagon when a little child,
but he had got himself a broomstick, which he put under his arm for a
crutch. He had fallen in with some other children and found the way to
Mike Scully's dump, which lay three or four blocks away. To this place
there came every day many hundreds of wagon-loads of garbage and trash
from the lake front, where the rich people lived; and in the heaps the
children raked for food--there were hunks of bread and potato peelings
and apple cores and meat bones, all of it half frozen and quite
unspoiled. Little Juozapas gorged himself, and came home with a
newspaper full, which he was feeding to Antanas when his mother came in.
Elzbieta was horrified, for she did not believe that the food out of the
dumps was fit to eat. The next day, however, when no harm came of it and
Juozapas began to cry with hunger, she gave in and said that he might go
again. And that afternoon he came home with a story of how while he had
been digging away with a stick, a lady upon the street had called him.
A real fine lady, the little boy explained, a beautiful lady; and
she wanted to know all about him, and whether he got the garbage for
chickens, and why he walked with a broomstick, and why Ona had died, and
how Jurgis had come to go to jail, and what was the matter with Marija,
and everything. In the end she had asked where he lived, and said that
she was coming to see him, and bring him a new crutch to walk with. She
had on a hat with a bird upon it, Juozapas added, and a long fur snake
around her neck.

She really came, the very next morning, and climbed the ladder to the
garret, and stood and stared about her, turning pale at the sight of
the blood stains on the floor where Ona had died. She was a "settlement
worker," she explained to Elzbieta--she lived around on Ashland Avenue.
Elzbieta knew the place, over a feed store; somebody had wanted her to
go there, but she had not cared to, for she thought that it must have
something to do with religion, and the priest did not like her to have
anything to do with strange religions. They were rich people who came
to live there to find out about the poor people; but what good they
expected it would do them to know, one could not imagine. So spoke
Elzbieta, naively, and the young lady laughed and was rather at a loss
for an answer--she stood and gazed about her, and thought of a cynical
remark that had been made to her, that she was standing upon the brink
of the pit of hell and throwing in snowballs to lower the temperature.

Elzbieta was glad to have somebody to listen, and she told all their
woes--what had happened to Ona, and the jail, and the loss of their
home, and Marija's accident, and how Ona had died, and how Jurgis could
get no work. As she listened the pretty young lady's eyes filled with
tears, and in the midst of it she burst into weeping and hid her face on
Elzbieta's shoulder, quite regardless of the fact that the woman had on
a dirty old wrapper and that the garret was full of fleas. Poor Elzbieta
was ashamed of herself for having told so woeful a tale, and the other
had to beg and plead with her to get her to go on. The end of it was
that the young lady sent them a basket of things to eat, and left a
letter that Jurgis was to take to a gentleman who was superintendent in
one of the mills of the great steelworks in South Chicago. "He will get
Jurgis something to do," the young lady had said, and added, smiling
through her tears--"If he doesn't, he will never marry me."

The steel-works were fifteen miles away, and as usual it was so
contrived that one had to pay two fares to get there. Far and wide the
sky was flaring with the red glare that leaped from rows of towering
chimneys--for it was pitch dark when Jurgis arrived. The vast works, a
city in themselves, were surrounded by a stockade; and already a full
hundred men were waiting at the gate where new hands were taken on. Soon
after daybreak whistles began to blow, and then suddenly thousands of
men appeared, streaming from saloons and boardinghouses across the way,
leaping from trolley cars that passed--it seemed as if they rose out of
the ground, in the dim gray light. A river of them poured in through the
gate--and then gradually ebbed away again, until there were only a few
late ones running, and the watchman pacing up and down, and the hungry
strangers stamping and shivering.

Jurgis presented his precious letter. The gatekeeper was surly, and put
him through a catechism, but he insisted that he knew nothing, and as he
had taken the precaution to seal his letter, there was nothing for the
gatekeeper to do but send it to the person to whom it was addressed.
A messenger came back to say that Jurgis should wait, and so he came
inside of the gate, perhaps not sorry enough that there were others less
fortunate watching him with greedy eyes. The great mills were getting
under way--one could hear a vast stirring, a rolling and rumbling
and hammering. Little by little the scene grew plain: towering, black
buildings here and there, long rows of shops and sheds, little railways
branching everywhere, bare gray cinders underfoot and oceans of
billowing black smoke above. On one side of the grounds ran a railroad
with a dozen tracks, and on the other side lay the lake, where steamers
came to load.

Jurgis had time enough to stare and speculate, for it was two hours
before he was summoned. He went into the office building, where a
company timekeeper interviewed him. The superintendent was busy, he
said, but he (the timekeeper) would try to find Jurgis a job. He had
never worked in a steel mill before? But he was ready for anything?
Well, then, they would go and see.

So they began a tour, among sights that made Jurgis stare amazed. He
wondered if ever he could get used to working in a place like this,
where the air shook with deafening thunder, and whistles shrieked
warnings on all sides of him at once; where miniature steam engines came
rushing upon him, and sizzling, quivering, white-hot masses of metal
sped past him, and explosions of fire and flaming sparks dazzled him and
scorched his face. The men in these mills were all black with soot, and
hollow-eyed and gaunt; they worked with fierce intensity, rushing here
and there, and never lifting their eyes from their tasks. Jurgis clung
to his guide like a scared child to its nurse, and while the latter
hailed one foreman after another to ask if they could use another
unskilled man, he stared about him and marveled.

He was taken to the Bessemer furnace, where they made billets of
steel--a dome-like building, the size of a big theater. Jurgis stood
where the balcony of the theater would have been, and opposite, by the
stage, he saw three giant caldrons, big enough for all the devils of
hell to brew their broth in, full of something white and blinding,
bubbling and splashing, roaring as if volcanoes were blowing through
it--one had to shout to be heard in the place. Liquid fire would leap
from these caldrons and scatter like bombs below--and men were working
there, seeming careless, so that Jurgis caught his breath with fright.
Then a whistle would toot, and across the curtain of the theater would
come a little engine with a carload of something to be dumped into one
of the receptacles; and then another whistle would toot, down by
the stage, and another train would back up--and suddenly, without an
instant's warning, one of the giant kettles began to tilt and topple,
flinging out a jet of hissing, roaring flame. Jurgis shrank back
appalled, for he thought it was an accident; there fell a pillar of
white flame, dazzling as the sun, swishing like a huge tree falling in
the forest. A torrent of sparks swept all the way across the building,
overwhelming everything, hiding it from sight; and then Jurgis looked
through the fingers of his hands, and saw pouring out of the caldron a
cascade of living, leaping fire, white with a whiteness not of earth,
scorching the eyeballs. Incandescent rainbows shone above it, blue,
red, and golden lights played about it; but the stream itself was white,
ineffable. Out of regions of wonder it streamed, the very river of life;
and the soul leaped up at the sight of it, fled back upon it, swift and
resistless, back into far-off lands, where beauty and terror dwell. Then
the great caldron tilted back again, empty, and Jurgis saw to his relief
that no one was hurt, and turned and followed his guide out into the
sunlight.

They went through the blast furnaces, through rolling mills where bars
of steel were tossed about and chopped like bits of cheese. All around
and above giant machine arms were flying, giant wheels were turning,
great hammers crashing; traveling cranes creaked and groaned overhead,
reaching down iron hands and seizing iron prey--it was like standing in
the center of the earth, where the machinery of time was revolving.

By and by they came to the place where steel rails were made; and Jurgis
heard a toot behind him, and jumped out of the way of a car with a
white-hot ingot upon it, the size of a man's body. There was a sudden
crash and the car came to a halt, and the ingot toppled out upon
a moving platform, where steel fingers and arms seized hold of it,
punching it and prodding it into place, and hurrying it into the grip of
huge rollers. Then it came out upon the other side, and there were more
crashings and clatterings, and over it was flopped, like a pancake on
a gridiron, and seized again and rushed back at you through another
squeezer. So amid deafening uproar it clattered to and fro, growing
thinner and flatter and longer. The ingot seemed almost a living thing;
it did not want to run this mad course, but it was in the grip of fate,
it was tumbled on, screeching and clanking and shivering in protest. By
and by it was long and thin, a great red snake escaped from purgatory;
and then, as it slid through the rollers, you would have sworn that it
was alive--it writhed and squirmed, and wriggles and shudders passed out
through its tail, all but flinging it off by their violence. There was
no rest for it until it was cold and black--and then it needed only to
be cut and straightened to be ready for a railroad.

It was at the end of this rail's progress that Jurgis got his chance.
They had to be moved by men with crowbars, and the boss here could use
another man. So he took off his coat and set to work on the spot.


It took him two hours to get to this place every day and cost him a
dollar and twenty cents a week. As this was out of the question, he
wrapped his bedding in a bundle and took it with him, and one of his
fellow workingmen introduced him to a Polish lodging-house, where he
might have the privilege of sleeping upon the floor for ten cents a
night. He got his meals at free-lunch counters, and every Saturday night
he went home--bedding and all--and took the greater part of his money to
the family. Elzbieta was sorry for this arrangement, for she feared that
it would get him into the habit of living without them, and once a week
was not very often for him to see his baby; but there was no other way
of arranging it. There was no chance for a woman at the steelworks, and
Marija was now ready for work again, and lured on from day to day by the
hope of finding it at the yards.


In a week Jurgis got over his sense of helplessness and bewilderment
in the rail mill. He learned to find his way about and to take all the
miracles and terrors for granted, to work without hearing the rumbling
and crashing. From blind fear he went to the other extreme; he became
reckless and indifferent, like all the rest of the men, who took
but little thought of themselves in the ardor of their work. It was
wonderful, when one came to think of it, that these men should have
taken an interest in the work they did--they had no share in it--they
were paid by the hour, and paid no more for being interested. Also they
knew that if they were hurt they would be flung aside and forgotten--and
still they would hurry to their task by dangerous short cuts, would use
methods that were quicker and more effective in spite of the fact
that they were also risky. His fourth day at his work Jurgis saw a man
stumble while running in front of a car, and have his foot mashed off,
and before he had been there three weeks he was witness of a yet more
dreadful accident. There was a row of brick furnaces, shining white
through every crack with the molten steel inside. Some of these were
bulging dangerously, yet men worked before them, wearing blue glasses
when they opened and shut the doors. One morning as Jurgis was passing,
a furnace blew out, spraying two men with a shower of liquid fire. As
they lay screaming and rolling upon the ground in agony, Jurgis rushed
to help them, and as a result he lost a good part of the skin from the
inside of one of his hands. The company doctor bandaged it up, but he
got no other thanks from any one, and was laid up for eight working days
without any pay.

Most fortunately, at this juncture, Elzbieta got the long-awaited chance
to go at five o'clock in the morning and help scrub the office floors of
one of the packers. Jurgis came home and covered himself with blankets
to keep warm, and divided his time between sleeping and playing with
little Antanas. Juozapas was away raking in the dump a good part of the
time, and Elzbieta and Marija were hunting for more work.

Antanas was now over a year and a half old, and was a perfect talking
machine. He learned so fast that every week when Jurgis came home it
seemed to him as if he had a new child. He would sit down and listen and
stare at him, and give vent to delighted exclamations--"Palauk! Muma!
Tu mano szirdele!" The little fellow was now really the one delight
that Jurgis had in the world--his one hope, his one victory. Thank God,
Antanas was a boy! And he was as tough as a pine knot, and with the
appetite of a wolf. Nothing had hurt him, and nothing could hurt him;
he had come through all the suffering and deprivation unscathed--only
shriller-voiced and more determined in his grip upon life. He was a
terrible child to manage, was Antanas, but his father did not mind
that--he would watch him and smile to himself with satisfaction. The
more of a fighter he was the better--he would need to fight before he
got through.

Jurgis had got the habit of buying the Sunday paper whenever he had the
money; a most wonderful paper could be had for only five cents, a whole
armful, with all the news of the world set forth in big headlines, that
Jurgis could spell out slowly, with the children to help him at the long
words. There was battle and murder and sudden death--it was marvelous
how they ever heard about so many entertaining and thrilling happenings;
the stories must be all true, for surely no man could have made such
things up, and besides, there were pictures of them all, as real as
life. One of these papers was as good as a circus, and nearly as good
as a spree--certainly a most wonderful treat for a workingman, who was
tired out and stupefied, and had never had any education, and whose work
was one dull, sordid grind, day after day, and year after year, with
never a sight of a green field nor an hour's entertainment, nor anything
but liquor to stimulate his imagination. Among other things, these
papers had pages full of comical pictures, and these were the main joy
in life to little Antanas. He treasured them up, and would drag them out
and make his father tell him about them; there were all sorts of animals
among them, and Antanas could tell the names of all of them, lying
upon the floor for hours and pointing them out with his chubby little
fingers. Whenever the story was plain enough for Jurgis to make out,
Antanas would have it repeated to him, and then he would remember it,
prattling funny little sentences and mixing it up with other stories in
an irresistible fashion. Also his quaint pronunciation of words was
such a delight--and the phrases he would pick up and remember, the most
outlandish and impossible things! The first time that the little rascal
burst out with "God damn," his father nearly rolled off the chair
with glee; but in the end he was sorry for this, for Antanas was soon
"God-damning" everything and everybody.

And then, when he was able to use his hands, Jurgis took his bedding
again and went back to his task of shifting rails. It was now April, and
the snow had given place to cold rains, and the unpaved street in front
of Aniele's house was turned into a canal. Jurgis would have to wade
through it to get home, and if it was late he might easily get stuck to
his waist in the mire. But he did not mind this much--it was a promise
that summer was coming. Marija had now gotten a place as beef-trimmer
in one of the smaller packing plants; and he told himself that he had
learned his lesson now, and would meet with no more accidents--so that
at last there was prospect of an end to their long agony. They could
save money again, and when another winter came they would have a
comfortable place; and the children would be off the streets and in
school again, and they might set to work to nurse back into life their
habits of decency and kindness. So once more Jurgis began to make plans
and dream dreams.

And then one Saturday night he jumped off the car and started home, with
the sun shining low under the edge of a bank of clouds that had been
pouring floods of water into the mud-soaked street. There was a rainbow
in the sky, and another in his breast--for he had thirty-six hours' rest
before him, and a chance to see his family. Then suddenly he came in
sight of the house, and noticed that there was a crowd before the door.
He ran up the steps and pushed his way in, and saw Aniele's kitchen
crowded with excited women. It reminded him so vividly of the time when
he had come home from jail and found Ona dying, that his heart almost
stood still. "What's the matter?" he cried.

A dead silence had fallen in the room, and he saw that every one was
staring at him. "What's the matter?" he exclaimed again.

And then, up in the garret, he heard sounds of wailing, in Marija's
voice. He started for the ladder--and Aniele seized him by the arm. "No,
no!" she exclaimed. "Don't go up there!"

"What is it?" he shouted.

And the old woman answered him weakly: "It's Antanas. He's dead. He was
drowned out in the street!"


Chapter 21
Jurgis spends days away from home, looking for work, fighting to stay alive. A chance meeting between Elzbieta's son and a settlement worker provides Jurgis with a letter to the superintendent of a steel mill. Because the mill is far away, Jurgis sleeps at a lodging house during the week, returning to Packingtown on the weekends. An accident at the mill forces Jurgis to miss some work but enables him to spend some time with his son. Marija and Elzbieta are both finally working. It is springtime but Jurgis is already preparing for the next winter. One Saturday, after a heavy rain, Jurgis returns home to discover that Antanas has drowned.
Antanas' death is the second central turning point in The Jungle. Just when Jurgis' life appears to be back on track, just when he begins to have hope for the future, fate transforms his dreams into nightmares. Antanas is another character who dies, another victim of fate. The settlement worker introduced in Chapter 21 represents a reversal of sexual politics -- for the first time, a female controls a man based on sex and economics. Her interference, although doing nothing to help the unsafe conditions in the plant, does result in a job for Jurgis. This is the complete opposite of the abusive sexual politics that Connor exercised. Although she is the first woman to exhibit a position of power, the results are still negative. Although she enables Jurgis to find a job, the job keeps him from his family; therefore, he is unable to protect his son. In fitting literary irony, Sinclair places the death of Antanas during springtime -- typically the season of new life and rebirth -- and just as Jurgis begins to have a sense of new life and a new beginning, it is literally drowned. Glossary settlement an institution in a depressed and congested neighborhood offering social services and educational and recreational activities. naively in an unaffectedly, or sometimes foolishly, simple manner; artlessly. catechism a formal series of questions; close questioning. billet a long, rectangular or cylindrical unfinished bar of iron or steel, usually smaller than 36 inches. incandescent very bright; shining brilliantly. ingot a mass of metal cast into a bar or other convenient shape.