Out of Thhis Furnace Literary Elements

Historical novel/Family saga

Braddock, Pennsylvania and surrounding steel town from within the context of the rise of the steel industry in the 1880s through the infamous strikes of the 1920’s and into the Great Depression.

Objective observational third person perspective with very limited penetration into the thoughts of characters.

The tone is predominantly detached and unemotional with occasional flourishes of philosophizing through metaphorical imagery. The mood is serious and dramatic without lapsing into melodrama.

Protagonists: the steelworkers and their union. Antagonists: the steel company owners, especially Andrew Carnegie.

The major conflict is between the steelworkers who want to unionize to ensure safe working conditions and fair pay and the company owners who employ any means necessary—including violence—to oppose unionizing.

The story reaches its climax with the union organization of the steelworkers in Braddock into the Committee for Industrial Organizations (CIO).

Johnny extinguishing the candles on his birthday cake with a blast of air that “flattened Kracha’s mustache against his face” foreshadows the imminent death which soon follows.

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“Well, I suppose Carnegie will give them a library” is an allusion to the fact that notorious anti-labor steel industry titan Andrew Carnegie spent untold millions on philanthropic projects for steel towns like building library, museums and schools—making sure they honored the effort by bearing his name—while simultaneously fighting every effort to actually pay workers a living wage or improve working conditions.

What sustains the generational tension of working in the mills is the pay that comes with work and the hope that work will be safer and this is dependence upon the later is conveyed in a vivid bit of narrative imagery: “work and hope alike came to a sudden, unreasonable end when they were carried — if machinery or molten metal had left anything to be carried — out of the mill feet-first. The greater part went on from day to day feeling that all this was only temporary since such things couldn't last, that just before human flesh and blood could stand no more something would happen to change everything for the better.”

“From out of the furnace” is also an example of paradox. Steel town populations are dependent upon the jobs they provide in order to live, but the polluted smoke they produce is slowly killing them day by day.

At his moment of greatest existential alienation and isolation from the brutal realities of the way so many others looked at life, Mike Dobrejcak’s philosophy embraces parallel expression of his silent contemplation: “He had hated poverty and ugliness; he had resented injustice and cried out against that sin of sins…He had never looked on work and food as more than the beginning of living, matters a man took in his stride as he went gathering life's richer fruits…He had felt that no human being need go without his portion of comfort and beauty and quietness; the world held enough for all.

The title is an example of synecdoche in the sense that both literally and metaphorically the entire existence of people who live in steel towns are utterly dependent upon them. “Furnace” is synecdoche which refers to the entire operation.

Personification for the most part is limited to machinery and commentary about business: “As time passed, as the machinery of the country slowed down and the streets darkened with unemployed and it became plain that something was wrong, and even plainer that no one knew what to do about it”