[In the following excerpt, Barthold discusses Attaway's "jazzlike use of images of fragmentation" in Blood on the Forge.]

Blood on the Forge begins on a Kentucky farm with only "one good strip of land" remaining, farmed by the Moss brothers—Big Mat, Melody, and Chinatown—and Big Mat's barren wife, Hattie. The barrenness of the land and of the woman signal the death of an agrarian and communal way of life. Big Mat's quarrel with a white man only hastens the Moss brothers' departure for the North, and they accept a steel-mill recruiter's offer to board a boxcar for the Allegheny River and a strikebound steel mill there.

Predominantly the narrative focuses on the destructive life in the mill community. The mill workers suffer crippling or fatal accidents: one loses his arm, another his legs (and later his life); Melody damages his hand, and Chinatown loses his eyes; Big Mat is killed in a strike-related riot. The novel concludes with Melody and the blind Chinatown once more on board a train, this time bound for Pittsburgh, using the $250 compensation for Chinatown's eyes to buy their tickets.

The structure and narrative technique of Blood on the Forge are largely familiar—the third-person narrator with selective omniscience, the hope for a new and better way of life that meets with disappointment, the destructive cycle in which the present recapitulates the dispossession of the past, and a linear journey that ends where it began. Anna, the prostitute who becomes Mat's woman, has already been discussed as a Mammy-Wattah figure. But there is another facet to Attaway's novel—its jazzlike use of images of fragmentation. These images carry the thematic burden of the novel and provide a solution to the problem of characterization in a novel whose characters are largely inarticulate, incapable of verbal expression.

Melody provides an early clue to this aspect of Attaway's technique. He believes that "a man had oughta know book learnin'—so's he kin know how to say what he's feeling." But earlier he has been described as never having had "a craving in him that he couldn't slick away on his guitar." For Melody, his guitar provides a substitute for words. As the narrative progresses, however, his capacity to give musical shape to his feelings is eroded. Early on, he admits that "every once in a while he would get filled up … with a feeling that was too big to turn into any kind of music." Later, in the mill town, his guitar playing changes, from the "slicking" that was "for back home and the distance in the hills" to "quick chords with the finger … right for that new place [but] nothin' like the blues that spread fan-wise from the banks of the Mississippi," a way of playing better suited to "the whirling lights and … the heart of the great red ingots." The stasis of Cane gives way to movement, and the images of twilight to images of whirling lights and fragmentation—and this is the change one must imagine in Melody's guitar playing, as he gives voice to his feelings about the milltown and about Anna. His feelings, however, get "too big" for even this changed way of playing; more or less deliberately, he injures his hand and hangs up his guitar. His feelings cut off from their expression, he becomes one of the images of fragmentation in the novel. And it is as though Attaway takes up where Melody leaves off, using a counterpoint of images centering on animals and barrenness that taken together signal that the erosion of time apparent in Cane is here complete. In the imagery of fragmentation, time explodes.

In Part I, Mat returns to Mr. Johnston's farm to butcher the pigs he has slaughtered the day before: "The sun was coming up. Nine white carcasses gleamed, gaping open, split down the middle, head and feet gone. They were like nine small human bodies." At the beginning of Part II, the Moss brothers flee Kentucky on the boxcar:

Squatted on the straw-spread floor of a boxcar, bunched up like hogs headed for market, riding in the dark for what might have been years, knowing time only as dippers of warm water gulped whenever they were awake, helpless and drooping because they were headed into the unknown and there was no sun, they forgot even that they had eyes in their heads and crawled around in the boxcar, as though it were a solid thing of blackness.

The metamorphosis of animal to human, human to animal, recurs throughout the novel, along with the notion of slaughter. Time becomes alternately fragmented and opaque, only partially knowable. In the "Mex Town" episode of Part II:

There were dogs everywhere. Stray curs came smelling at [their] heels. They did not kick at them. The whores of Mex Town had more love for animals than for men. One steel worker who had killed a dog had been found on the ash pile. A knife had let his blood soak the ashes.

Later, Chinatown loses his eyes and loses as well even his fragmentary perceptions of time, the red pop and gold teeth that punctuate the darkness. He is looked after by Anna: "Anna would take good care of Chinatown. Like all her kind, she had a ready sympathy for a maimed animal, whether dog or man." In the dogfights that are staged for the workers' amusement and the dog trainer's profit, the description of one man's method of training his dog to fight mimes the "training" Big Mat undergoes for his fight at the conclusion of Part IV:

Son's [the dog's] owner … knew how to keep a dog savage and ready for blood. [He] kept Son in a dark closet for weeks at a time, feeding him raw meat sprinkled with gunpowder. Sometimes [he] would let him out and tease him with a sharp stick. Son would tear up anything that came within the radius of his chain.

By the time Big Mat is "deputized" to help control the strikers, he too is "savage" and "ready for blood"—and for much the same reason. He has been locked in darkness: on the boxcar, in a town where days pass with the sun concealed behind steel-mill smoke, and in a work schedule that means rising before dawn and returning from work after dark. Tormented by his growing impotence with Anna, he spends hours of his "free" time balancing a rock at the end of his outstretched arm as a proof of his strength. Chained by the circumstances of his life, Big Mat is more than ready "to tear up anything."

The men's dismemberment in work accidents again mimes the slaughter of the hogs. In the women, too, there is dismemberment and the stench of death: one of the first women the brothers encounter is a black whore with "a rot-stink." They are told that "her left breast 'bout rotted off…. You kin smell it a mile away."

Images of barrenness figure as another form of fragmentation, of human beings cut off from time and cyclic continuity. In Part I, most of Mat's farmland is so lacking in topsoil that it is barren; and he has no mule for plowing. His wife, Hattie, is barren, having suffered six or seven miscarriages. Though Anna finds in Big Mat a fulfillment of her yearning for a man "with a pine tree on his belly, hard like rock all night," by the end of Part IV she has turned to "a piece of ice" beneath him, "a dead body," and the image again is one of barrenness. Earlier, Mat has explained his barrenness as the result of a curse by God on "a child of sin." He knows how to lift the curse: "I got to preach the gospel—that the only way." But his knowledge, too, is barren; "No matter how much inside [him]," he can't preach. "If I tries to preach 'fore folks it all jest hits against the stopper in my throat and build up and build up till I fit to bust with wild words that ain't comin' out." He lacks the words to bring forth the Word, and belief is fragmented from its expression.

These various images of fragmentation are epitomized in the character of Smothers, the mad, crippled timekeeper at the mill. Smothers feels that the earth will sooner or later take revenge against the steel mill's violation of its sacredness, and the revenge will focus on the men who work the mill. "Steel gonna git you," he says. Crippled in an accident that he brought on himself as an act of defiance of the "monster" mill, he has become a kind of mill worker everyman, his crippled legs his wounds in an ongoing battle. Before he is killed, in the same explosion that takes Chinatown's eyes, his foreman has jokingly promised him that if steel "gits" him, "we make you up into watch fobs. The boys 'round the bunkhouse'll wear you across their chests for luck." After Smothers's death, Melody passes through the bunkhouse and finds Bo keeping the promise, affixing watch chains to shreds of steel from the explosion.

Smothers's vision and death echo Sekoni's in The Interpreters: both are struck down when natural process goes out of control. The Keeper of Time is fragmented into shards, and time explodes.