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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
The description of the Shirtwaist factory fire vivifies the event by telling it from the first person perspective. That puts the reader right in the narrators shoes and allows him to feel, see and hear what the narrator experienced. The narrator also uses words and expressions that give immense weight to the narrativewords like thud-dead, which is repeated again and again for emphasis. And then the overall disturbing imagery that is used to convey the horror of the scene helps to vivify the event as well: the heaps of dead bodies, the policeman going about with tags, the image of the water from the fire hoses coming back blood redall of these images make the scene so intense that the reader is shocked and saddened to tears. Then the narrator describes how these girls who fell to their deaths were protesting just one year ago for better safety at the factoryand now their dead bodies protest. That line packs a punch that one cannot recover from.
The piece is a call for progressive reform in that it describes a disaster that could have been avoided had the necessary safety precautions been put in place. It laments the fact that these girls had to die to get their point acrossthe point they had made earlier before dying. It uses bitter irony to note that the only answer to their protests were their deaths because no reform was ever initiated to address the issues the girls tried to get the community to notice. Now everybody is noticing because nothing is more horrific than more than one hundred dead girls, some of the just engaged or just married or just coming into the bloom of their life. The piece calls for reform by calling attention to this horror scene and noting that it all could have been prevented had the leaders of the factory or the state or city simply taken action and listened to what the girls were saying in their protests.