Do you think the novel ended on a positive or negative note?

I felt that the end of the novel sounded a bit more victorious than it should have. There was so much suffering in the novel that this sudden conversion of Jurgis seemed out of place. The novel resolves with a victory, if not in actual votes than in momentum, for the Socialist Party. Jurgis’s narrative is never resolved beyond experiencing his spiritual and intellectual awakening, and the reader is unsure as to whether his life truly improved or if he remained subject to the forces of the natural world that caused his previous demise. The novel’s closing chapters, critics have charged, resemble propagandist material more than literary achievement, a fault that some feel keeps The Jungle from achieving the literary ambitions that Sinclair proposed for the novel.