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,
He stood with his arms folded, he peered at them. He is not satisfied with Owen and body language and the future tens in his warnings adds to this fact, ‘He raised his hand threateningly’ , ‘shook his fist’. ‘you will answer for this’. Owen seems to be very strong-willed, he knows how to reach his communicative aim asking tag-questions “you don’t intend casting that spindle, do you?” , insisting on the positive answer. In the beginning his grammar and phonetics seem to be correct because he uses complex sentences, while Squint prefers simple sentences and contracted forms “d’you”. But the situation changes after the death. Owen yields to emotions and his speech becomes full of colloquial words as ‘pal’ ‘fellers’. Squint’s behavior also differ. The author uses simile to show this transformations “Squint trembled like a man afflicted with ague.”. But Owen handles this situation, he tries to be convincing he uses a lot of repetitions of words “Accident “ , roots “murder”. The author compares Owen to an animal “clutched him, hissed between his bared teeth. A set of rhetorical questions and literary words “affair” and the passive structures make his appeal more vivid. At the end of this story Squint looks like a common worker, the repetitions of the word “shuffle back “ , the use of the pronoun we that stands for the workers and him show that he is looking for the support among other workers. As the workers don’t know which side to choose this conflict