The Death of George Kracha
The first-generation immigrant of the family at the heart of the story manages to outlast the next generation and linger on well into the narrative, almost hanging on until the very end. His endurance becomes symbolic of the long struggle for newly arrived Americans to work their way up the ladder and imagery is singularly introduced into the narrative to highlight this significance:
“The tall iron gates were locked for the night. The street lamps came, illuminating the bare sidewalk and the granite stubble of a stonecutter’s yard, but a little way beyond the gates the shadows, like the silence, were undisturbed. The wind moved gently through the trees and stirred the ribbon on a wreath, the petals of a flower. The last light died out of the west and then it was dark on the hill where Kracha lay; only on the horizon’s rim the Bessemers continued to flicker restlessly against the sky.”
The Riddle of the Title
The title of the novel acts as a kind of imagery riddle; it turns out to be an incomplete thought that will be not be filled in until almost the very last page. The furnace is a metonymic metaphor of the powerful heat generated within the steel mills, of course, but it is also a symbol of the strengthening processes of attaining the American Dream. The full width and breadth of the meaning of the title only becomes clear with the imagery presented within the fully completed thought:
“Out of this furnace, this metal.”
Class Division
The history of the immigrant experience in America in this novel is presented through the lens of human society being a history of class struggle. Class struggle is beautifully presented as imagery in a scene late in the novel in a description of what two men look out over from their position sitting on third-generation immigrant Dobie’s front porch at
“the rooftops spread out below them. In the immediate foreground they were brightened by patches of green where trees were leafing, by the clean freshness of a newly painted house or garage. The flatter expanse of Braddock lower down was a uniform, soiled colorlessness. Eleventh Street was a straight wide scar on this dingy plain, the spire of St. Michael’s at its head, the glintless river at its foot and the long roof of the First Ward school near its middle. The flat-sided hill was still brown; because it was a Saturday the sky above the blast furnaces were fairly clean.”
Management
The management class in the steel mills are described as literally being “a difference species” from the workers. In one particularly effective scene, the General Superintendent is described with vivid imagery as seen through the perspective of Mike, the lowly worker, as"
“…the godlike dispenser of jobs and layoffs, life and death…His clothes were of wool, his shoes of leather, and by an effort Mike could imagine him eating, lying with a woman or even laughing. But what he thought and felt, what it was that made him think and feel as he did—this was inconceivable, and it was this that set him apat…partaking of the company’s inhuman incomprehensibility and like the company going his way, doing this, doing that, hiring, firing, shutting down, cutting wages, raising them, and giving no reasons, maintaining throughout a cold impassibility before which a man felt himself divested of humanity”
