Capitalism devalues workers' human qualities, and strenuous, repetitive jobs turn men and women into mindless beasts of burden. Throughout The Jungle, characters are reduced by their jobs and circumstances to animals who must fight to satisfy their most primal needs. Just as the meatpackers ruthlessly slaughter scores of animals each day, the capitalist machine grinds down its workforce, treating human laborers as an expendable resource.
Animals Quotes in The Jungle
The The Jungle quotes below all refer to the symbol of Animals. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3
Quotes
They use everything about the hog except the squeal.
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Chapter 28
Quotes
There are a million people, men and women and children, who share the curse of the wage-slave…There are a thousand…who are the masters of these slaves, who own their toil…They own not merely the labor of society, they have bought the governments; and everywhere they use their raped and stolen power to intrench themselves in their privileges, to dig wider and deeper the channels through which the river of profits flows to them!—And you, workingmen, workingmen! You have been brought up to it, you plod on like beasts of burden, thinking only of the day and its pain…
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Animals Symbol Timeline in The Jungle
The timeline below shows where the symbol Animals appears in The Jungle. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 2
...see clouds of black smoke and hear the distant lowing and grunting of ten thousand animals.
(full context)
Chapter 3
...pens" stretching out before them. They observe miles of railroad tracks upon which thousands of animals are carted in everyday to be slaughtered.
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...visitors uneasy. The hogs are processed by hundreds of men, each performing one task. The animals are processed completely and all parts of them—entrails, waste, skin, bones—are used in some way....
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Chapter 7
...with blood freezing on them and congealing to their feet. With numb hands, they butcher animals and run around through the steam with sharp blades, leading to grisly accidents.
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Chapter 8
...affected by the seasonal slump and must wait in the freezing stockyards until the first animals arrive, sometimes not till the late afternoon, and stay late into the night to slaughter...
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Chapter 15
Ona's hysterical outbreaks continue, and she begins to resemble a frightened animal. As the holiday rush approaches, the family's jobs require them to work fifteen or sixteen...
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