Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Out of This Furnace, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Immigration and American Identity
Industrialization and Destruction
The American Dream vs. Reality
Women’s Work
Capital vs. Labor
Summary
Analysis
Dobie emerges from a day of work in the steel mill. The General Superintendent, a silk- and hat-favoring dandy named Mr. Flack, is casually listening to the mutterings of a lower boss. Flack’s dapper appearance masks a raw temper and even rawer power that he wields in the mill. A car meets up with Dobie and out pop Mikie and Chuck, Alice’s son. Mikie is sixteen and has grown taller after his years in the sanitarium. Mikie and Chuck are now apprentice machinists in the Westinghouse. Dobie tells them that he is leaving the mill and moving to Detroit, and Mikie expresses interest in going along. Dobie tells him to finish off his remaining three years of apprenticeship before going anywhere.
The transition from Part Three (Mary) to Part Four (Dobie) marks the point where the novel’s journey of disappointment and hopelessness begins its gradual turn into redemption narrative. Part Four begins with Dobie picking up where his father, Mike, left off, but with some crucial differences. Dobie is now a steelworker, but he is a skilled armature winder. His brother is also finishing an apprenticeship to become a skilled laborer. Such positions were out of reach for Mike and Kracha’s generations, but they are now available to the descendents of the original Slovak immigrants. By emphasizing this shift towards better opportunities for third-generation Slovaks, Part Four subtly hints at the more hopeful direction the novel will ultimately take.
Themes
Chuck mentions that maybe Dobie’s departure will get his father, Frank, “off his behind and looking for work.” Frank has been “sitting pretty” for several years at this point. Pauline had died a year after Mary. Both were buried near Alice’s house, but a family spat over Anna’s control over the funeral and insurance led to Dobie receiving Pauline’s insurance money. The sanitarium had discharged Agnes and Mikie. Agnes went to stay with Anna, while Mikie lived with Dobie in Alice’s house.
The family fight over the insurance from Mary’s funeral demonstrates that while family connections are crucial to the survival of ethnic families in the steel towns, hardship also leads such families to quarrel and argue, especially over money issues.
Themes
Dobie has at last completed his armature winder’s apprenticeship, while John Barry now works in the Donora rod mill. The railroad shopmen go on strike, leaving Frank without work and unable to return to the mill. He fears he is blacklisted, having participated in three big strikes in six years. His misfortune grows when Alice gives birth to, and loses, yet another baby. The child is among nine of ten who have perished. Frank goes to Michigan, where he hopes to convince his parents to let Alice and the children move to the farm with him. Both of Frank’s parents seem to have lost their minds, however, and his father chases him off the farm and back to the mill towns, where he works a series of odd jobs, when he works at all.
Due to his history of participating in strikes, the steel company has blacklisted Frank, a process by which an authority or an organization complies a list of people it considers untrustworthy so that it can avoid hiring those people. Thus, Frank’s being blacklisted means the company will never hire him back as a worker because they fear he will instigate, or participate in, more strikes. Frank’s extreme falling out with his parents also reveals that family is not always an option to fall back on during hard times.
Themes
Finally, Dobie moves to Detroit, where he works for five years. He lives with a Canadian couple near the Chrysler plant, where he works roughing pistons. Detroit is a booming city that is “flooding the world with cars” and therefore it is “full of young men away from home for the first time.” Dobie takes advantage of the city’s amenities: he ice-skates, attends burlesque shows, and makes several visits across the river to Windsor, Ontario, Canada. He also makes a few trips back to Braddock, once to bid farewell to Mikie before he goes to New York and another time to attend Agnes’s high school graduation.
Dobie’s multi-year stint in Detroit is his attempt to try to escape the steel town of his birth and its practical guarantee of a lifetime of working in the blast furnaces. Mikie makes a similar attempt to branch out by moving to New York. Both men take different paths to escape a fate in the steel towns, but neither can fully leave behind the place where they come from. The notion that a person’s birthplace puts an indelible stamp on that person’s identity is one that both Mikie and Dobie will discuss later in Part Four.
Themes
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For his last job in Detroit, Dobie works the night shift at Budd Wheel “riveting the lining to brake bands for Ford.” When payday comes, he and the other men discover a shortage in their checks. The foreman tells them the rates have been changed. The angry men protest until the company summons “guards and bosses” from different departments to kick the men out of the plant. It is now the early part of the Great Depression, and Dobie remains in Detroit until an opportunity for work in Pittsburgh proves too good to pass up. The Pittsburgh job does not pan out, however, and he is soon “back at his old job in the electric shop and boarding in Perovsky's hotel in East Pittsburgh.” The electric shop foreman tells Dobie he came at just the right time, as two winders had quit the week before. The Depression is now growing worse, leaving the streets “darkened with unemployed.”
While Dobie enjoys his years in Detroit, he finds that even by moving away from Braddock, he cannot escape the struggles between workers and bosses that proved so troubling in the steel industry. The auto company adopts the steel bosses’ tactic of using law enforcement to rough up striking workers, and the loss of his auto part position eventually sends Dobie back to Braddock to work in his old armature-winder job. In this section, Dobie’s experience echoes that of his grandfather, who tried to escape the mills by opening a butcher shop, only to see that venture fail and be forced back into the mills. Dobie will soon learn that he will have work hard if he is to avoid Kracha’s grim fate.
Themes
