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Part 1, Chapter 4
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
Kracha continues working for the railroad, where he builds, repairs, and maintains the rails and surrounding land. It is backbreaking labor, and during an “excellent month,” he “made as much as twenty-five dollars.” During the summer, he farms to make ends meet. The railroad company moves its workers frequently. Kracha and his family move to Bear Creek, where Elena gives birth to their second daughter, Alice. They then move to Harvey’s Lake and then Plymouth, where their third daughter, Anna, is born. While Kracha continues toiling on the railroad, Dubik tires of the work, and decides to move with Dorta to Braddock to work in the steel mills. Once he finds a job working the furnaces there, he writes Kracha and urges him to follow.
The American Dream promises success to anyone regardless of class or station in life, provided they work hard to achieve it. However, the reality, as Kracha discovers, is that hard work mostly leads to more work for little compensation. Industrial wages do not compensate for the brutal nature of industrial work; at best, they are little better than no wages at all. The toil and constant relocation that railroad work entails leads the White Haven group to try their hand at another type of industrial labor in the steel mills.
Themes
Kracha misses his friend, and Dubik’s absence saddens Elena, as he frequently urged Kracha (to little avail) to sympathize with her struggles. “Put yourself in her place. How would you like to live her life, eh?” Dubik tells him. Yet Kracha remains stubbornly unsympathetic to Elena’s depression. Not long after Dorta and Dubik move to Braddock, Andrej and Francka also decide to take their chances in the steel mills, but they move to Homestead when labor struggles between the Knights of Labor union and steel magnate Andrew Carnegie shut down the Braddock furnaces. Carnegie moves his orders to his other mills, and the Knights capitulate, signaling the end of the union and its hard-earned eight-hour workday in Braddock.
Dubik stands out for his sympathetic qualities as a Slovak male who understands how hard women’s lives truly are. This makes him a rarity in a patriarchal culture that usually equates “work” with labor that men perform in exchange for a wage. In this paradigm, men view women’s household duties as outside the realm of “real” labor that deserves appreciation. In this passage, Bell also introduces the first of many struggles between labor (the workers) and capital (those who own the means of production) that will soon dominate the lives of his Slovak characters.
Themes
After a full year, Kracha finally joins his friends from White Haven by moving to Homestead to seek work in the mills. He and his family travel by train to Pittsburgh, where they switch trains and finally arrive in Homestead. Francka meets them at the station.
For Slovak immigrants to America, the importance of family connections is such that Kracha does not want to be separated from the Sedlars and Dubiks for long.
Themes
