The Workday Ends
This novel is a portrait of Italian-American immigrant life far removed from the blood and bullets of the Corleone family. These are men who work for little pay and for the dream will always be greater than the reward. Life revolves around the labor of work, but relief revolves around the end of the workday:
“The mad day's brutal conflict is forgiven, and strained limbs prostrate themselves so that swollen veins can send the yearning blood coursing and pulsating deliciously as though the body mountained leaping streams.”
The Bureaucrats
Standing in opposition to the meek, hungry and hurt applicants for workman’s compensation desperately searching for someone to help stand the bureaucrats. Though ostensibly assigned to fulfill that very role, their actions and behavior suggestion differently:
“But those who led them and carried leather cases beneath arm—who are these fine-looking men, well-groomed, daintily mustached and casually opulent? What do they here? They look not anguished and tightly pressed. They look not humble and at sea. They look not part of grief, and seem masters. They bear transparent distant eye of policeman. They seem not of Christ.”
Gloria
Paul’s sexual awakening arrives courtesy of a girl named Gloria. The imagery which conveys this turning point in his life is surprisingly erotic even as it is couched in metaphorical imagery:
“At the doorway of Tenement he bumped into Gloria. Her body breathed a blond milky dampness to him. Something within waved up high. He shut his eyes and wanted to fly.”
Big Steel
Big steel is the name of the skyscraper being constructed downtown. It is a massive project stretching out a full city block at its foundation and rising fifty floors into the sky. Paul is both irresistibly drawn to the mysterious majesty of its construction and repulsed by the terror it projects:
“At about the twentieth floor were concrete workers pushing the heavy big-wheeled buggies from the hoists and dumping the fresh concrete into the floor forms. Above them the scaffold hangers were fastening the protruding I-beams from which other scaffolders hung the swinging scaffolds for the bricklayers. From the very peak the hundred-foot derrick swung its steel latticed arm out beyond the building and from it descended a cable with an ironworker clinging to it. The man was small-small and grew larger as he came toward the ground.
