Out of This Furnace

Out of This Furnace

by

Thomas Bell

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Out of This Furnace: Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Mike and Steve leave the steel mill on a rainy day and head over to the saloon for a drink. When it rains, “everything in the mill steamed, cinders, ladles, pig iron, ingots. Puddles of water in the wrong places took on explosive qualities.” On clear nights, by contrast, the steel mill “made a man feel small as he trudged into its pile of structures, its shadows.” One of Mike’s stove-gang bosses is discovered grafting workers’ wages and is fired from the mill.
Here, the intimidating presence of the steel mill, which dwarves the puny humans who stoke its fires, takes on a near-mythic quality. The revelation that one of the mill bosses has been stealing workers’ wages contrasts the epic size of the mills with the petty smallness of the men who run them.
Themes
Industrialization and Destruction Theme Icon
Capital vs. Labor Theme Icon
Working the day shift brings more heat from the greater number of mill bosses, and when the General Superintendent (GI), “the godlike dispenser of jobs and layoffs, life and death,” visits the furnaces, the workers are even more anxious. Watching the GI, Mike imagines what it must be like to have such power over other men. In the GI’s presence, steel workers cease to be skilled laborers and instead become “degraded to the status of employees who did what they were told for a wage, whose feelings didn't matter.” Soon, Mike must work the 24-hour shift, a grueling, exhausting process during which “he ceased to be a human being, became a mere appendage to the furnace, a lost, damned creature.” Young men can survive the long shift unscathed and carry on with other pursuits afterward, but men in their 30s, like Mike, just want to go home and sit around.
Bell’s comparison of the GI to a god is not hyperbolic. In fact, the men who operate the mills effectively maintain godlike powers in their ability to control the steelworkers’ lives. Under the control of men of capital, workers cease be human beings and instead functions as extensions of the machines in the mills. Mike discovers this for himself when he works the long shift, when the exhaustion of the labor saps him of all human feeling and renders his body just another part of the furnace.
Themes
Industrialization and Destruction Theme Icon
Capital vs. Labor Theme Icon
Quotes