Up-Ladle at Three

The short story “Up-ladle at three” has a great tension throughout the story and thus keeps up readers’ interest to the end of it. The description establishes scenery and the process of iron-making. The narrative presents a succession of events and makes the story dynamic. Dialogues make the characters self-revealing and the author implicitly shows their traits. This interplay of description, narrative and dialogue creates the effect of suspense, because we can only guess how characters would behavior in each situation. The author also reveals characters and relations through conflicts.
I would like to start with the conflict man against machine, because the main event of the story is connected with it. One of the characters, Ritchie, is described as a very childlike and naïve person. The author uses simile “trapped like a bloody rabbit” to show it. The statements with the colloquial words “mam” and “fag” reveal the emotional state of the character, and the repetition of his “mam” sounds more like gradation. Also the gradation “he shrieked continuously, loudly, terrifyingly” makes us sympathize with this fellow. Even the author’s description of Ritchie with inverted word order attracts our attention. His enemy is associated with the steel. The author employs the trite metaphor “a red tongue of flame shot into the air” so that we can imagine its colour and shape. The steel is personified because it “shot, bit, rose” and we can compare it to the dragon, that imposes danger and aggression and the feeling of the approximate death. Its colour changes during the conflict from white to red and yellow. After this battle Ritchie’s face turned yellow also, it means that he was defeated. We can observe cases of asyndeton “shoulders dropped, head bowed, the perspiring teemer walked” and “ the skin..was blistered, the eyelashes singed”. The inversion “his face, a dirty yellow, drawn and haggard” emphasizes the state of Ritchie. As for the syntax here, the author uses