Syntax

• “…after waiting for a little and beating with his foot to get the time, casts up his eyes to the ceiling and begins to saw—‘Broom! broom! broom!’” (11)
• “What! she would cry. To be married on the roadside like a parcel of beggars! No! No!” (70)
• “Here he stayed, breakfastless, for two hours, until the throng was driven away by the clubs of the police. There was no work for him that day.” (215)
• “The other took it, and began to examine it; he smoothed it between his fingers, and he held it up to the light; he turned it over, and upside down, and edgeways.” (271)

Throughout nearly all of The Jungle Upton Sinclair uses a fairly standard sentence structure with few exceptions. His main style does not use syntax as one of its standard methods showing his tone or purpose of the novel. Although it does not happen much, one of the interesting and unorthodox structures he uses is repeating an exclamatory word that’s not part of dialogue. This takes place in the second example where Sinclair seems like he is trying to either show you what the characters are thinking in those situations or he is trying to show the reader how they should be reacting to the situation. Sinclair also uses syntax to create fragmented or jumpy sounding sentences as found in the latter two quotes. In the third excerpt Sinclair cuts up the sentence with commas to try and emphasize the slow sadness that Jurgis must live through even on a normal day. In the fourth quotation Sinclair once again uses commas to break up the sentence and show how feverish and frantic the man was while looking at the dollar bill. While these are rather rare occurrences they do have strong and important effects on the sentences on a whole.