Chapter XIII explained

What happens

Themes in this chapter

• Health and Safety Hazards

  The fertilizer plant is depicted as a hellish place where workers breathe bone dust and ammonia fumes, doomed to die within a certain time. The sausage room also poses deadly dampness and strain, while Kristoforas's death from tainted sausage underscores the lethal risks of unregulated food production.

• Poverty and Survival

  Jurgis debates whether he can afford to refuse even the most horrific work, knowing his family depends on him. The family's struggle to afford a funeral for Kristoforas, relying on Marija's contribution and neighbors' charity, illustrates the crushing poverty that forces them to make impossible choices.

• Family and Sacrifice

  Elzbieta's inconsolable grief for her crippled son and her determination to give him a proper burial, despite the family's poverty, highlights the deep emotional bonds and sacrifices within the family. Ona's endurance in the sausage room and Jurgis's willingness to consider the fertilizer plant reflect their sacrifices for each other.

Characters to notice

• Jurgis Rudkus

  Desperately seeking work, Jurgis contemplates taking a job in the fertilizer plant, a place so horrific that men speak of it in whispers. He debates whether he can refuse any work, even this, given his family's dire need.

• Ona Rudkus

  Ona works in the sausage room, enduring dampness, electric light, and the sickening odor of moist flesh. She suffers almost as much as Jurgis did in the fertilizer mill, but must continue to support the family.

• Elzbieta Rudkus

  Elzbieta is inconsolable after the death of her crippled son, Kristoforas. She begs neighbors for money to give him a proper funeral with a mass and a wooden cross, and remains haunted by the loss for months.

• Marija Berczynskas

  Marija contributes ten dollars toward Kristoforas's funeral, helping Elzbieta when Jurgis insists the child must be buried by the city.

• Kristoforas

  The crippled child of Elzbieta dies suddenly after eating smoked sausage, possibly made from tubercular pork. He had congenital dislocation of the hip and rickets, and was only three years old.

• Kotrina

  Little Kotrina is alone with Kristoforas when he falls ill and runs out screaming for help, but the doctor arrives too late.

Key passages

• “There is a place that waits for the lowest man—the fertilizer-plant! The men would talk about it in awestricken whispers.”

  The fertilizer plant is the most dreaded job in Packingtown, spoken of in fearful whispers as the ultimate degradation.

  This sets the tone for Jurgis's dread and the extreme lengths he may have to go to for work.

• “The woman did not go on; she stayed right there—hour after hour, day after day, year after year, twisting sausage-links and racing with death.”

  The women in the sausage room remain at their posts endlessly, working piecework at a frantic pace, as if competing with death itself.

  Highlights the relentless and dehumanizing nature of piecework in the meatpacking industry.

• “If only she had heard about it in time, so that she might have had that great doctor to cure him of his lameness!”

  Elzbieta laments that she never learned about a wealthy philanthropist who brought a surgeon to treat poor children with Kristoforas's condition, but even if she had, she lacked the time and money to take him.

  Illustrates the tragic gap between the rich's charity and the poor's inability to access it.