Out of This Furnace: Part 2, Chapter 9 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.

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.