And You Think You Understand Suffering?

I just read a great book for my Contemporary Literature Class titled The Jungle. This novel by Upton Sinclair was first published in the early 1900s and had such shock value that the United States President, Theodore Roosevelt, ordered a federal investigation into the food industry, the book sold over 150,00 copies and Sinclair was able to become a national figure and run on the socialist ticket for congress. I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Jungle and I feel that the sensuality of life has been revealed to me in an unpredictable way. Raised in a strong republican family I scoffed at those who labeled themselves as ‘victims’ and reacted to life through the victim philosophy of the socialist cause. After reading Sinclair’s novel I have begun to think that just maybe there might be some truth to the impossibility of individuality and making it on one’s own by simply working harder. I have also realized that there is good in suffering and that until a person goes through brutal suffering a person has not authentically experienced the extent of being human. Suffering is good in for its own sake. I often have heard it argued that suffering is a means rather than an end; suffering is in place to help one become more appreciative. But, after vicariously feeling some of those same depths that Sinclair depicted through Jurgis (pronounced yar-gis), I believe that maybe suffering is in fact good.

Jurgis, a Lithuanian immigrant who had come to Chicago because of rumors of becoming rich in America, continued working and though life was hard Jurgis and his family was able to continue earning money and stay alive until one unforeseen day in the middle of a harsh winter when a steer broke loose at the stockyards and Jurgis, in an effort to leap to safety, badly sprained his ankle. He tried to continue work, but soon the pain became so extreme that he almost fainted. Somehow he managed to make it home that night though the blistering snow, though he could scarcely see for the pain. After a visit to the doctor he and the family realized with terror in their hearts that Jurgis would be unable to return to work for at least three months. His seventeen and half cents an hour job would surely be given away in a matter of hours to one of the hundreds of unemployed men waiting out in the cold for work and there was no such thing as suing your employer or workers compensation. Jurgis family would soon be out of money and they were still in the bitter months of winter. For Jurgis, shivering and painfully now lying in his bed in the drafty threadbaren place that he called home:

It was like seeing the world fall away from underneath his feet; like plunging down into a bottomless abyss, and to yawning caverns of despair. It might be true, then, after all, what others had told him about life, that the best powers of a man might not be equal to it! It might be true that, strive as he would, toil as he would, he might fail, and go down and be destroyed! The thought of this was like an icy hand at his hearth; the thought that here, in this ghastly home of all horror, he and all those who were dear to him might lie and perish of starvation and cold and there would be no ear to hear their cry, no hand to help them! It was true, it was true—that there in this huge city, with its stores of heaped-up wealth, human creatures” might die without the slightest share of mercy (111-112).

Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle. New York: Airmont, 1965.