Ragtime in Review

Note: I'm posting this the day before the end of the book is actually discussed in class so, uh... if you haven't read to the end yet you should skip this blog post for a sans-spoiler experience.

Though this is the understatement of the century, Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow was certainly a wild ride. With the final chapter having been completed, it's hard to articulate all of the thoughts that I've had while reading.

I think the most striking thing to me was how a definite shift in narration style was present the further along the reader engaged with the novel. I don't mean that suddenly the narrator actually took on a tone that was more than neutral on the surface, but that things became less ironic (at least to me) with the introduction of Coalhouse Walker's plot. In the beginning, with the likes of Younger Brother and Houdini and Evelyn Nesbit, there was not end to ironic phrasing and subtext when poking fun at these characters and delving into their worlds. However, I picked up on less of the irony designed to make fun of  other characters, rather than carefully-chosen words and phrases that appeared to be trying to expose injustice of other characters. That last sentence made almost no sense, but hear me out!

Flashback to Chapter 23, which is the beginning of Coalhouse Walker's situation with his Model T Ford. On page 176, while Coalhouse was considering plans of action, a curious sentence appears on behalf of the narrator: "Apparently it did not occur to him to ingratiate himself in the fashion of his race."

On a basic level, this seems inherently racist--does the narrator really think that Coalhouse's plan should have been to become deferential to the fire station bullies. Here, I think the statement is incredibly ironic. Apparently Coalhouse didn't even know that he should have started acting like he was actually back (and also throwback to when Father noted that Coalhouse 'didn't realize he was black'). Really, I think the narrator was trying to express a common sentiment of the time (in the novel); most others in this situation wouldn't have reacted defiantly in the manner that Coalhouse did, and it seems like the obvious to just go with the status quo and make things less difficult for yourself. And so this is what I mean by exposing injustice: I could see the firemen having this sentiment, I could see Father having this sentiment, and I could see the common public and maybe the black community in the town adopting the same view.

There are more instances of this later in the novel, and I think that the fact that there's more of this injustice-exposing irony prompts the reader to take the events of the novel more seriously. It's completely laughable, in a way, that Younger Brother was outfitting himself as a minstrel worker, but it's also kind of... exposing injustice in its own front. He appears to be either taking the focus of Coalhouse's movement away from himself (as he is white), or poking fun at the fact that there's a typically racist icon fighting for anti-discriminatory purposes and hurling bombs alongside actual black people.

Even though we all saw it coming, Coalhouse's death (basically his suicide; the narrator notes that Coalhouse knows that he would be struck down if he made one 'wrong' move) was definitely saddening. The end of the book is basically a parade of death juxtaposed against happy frontiers: we have Coalhouse, Younger Brother, and Father all lined up in succession with their deaths, and then Mother's marriage to Tateh and their patchwork family somehow making it through life positively. Regardless, I'm really glad that Doctorow finished the novel by returning to our fictional characters.

In the end, I'm glad that I got to read a novel that was well out of my comfort zone, but it still leaves a lot of questions from discussion unanswered. Coalhouse brings up a good point: how much violence in the name of justice is acceptable? Somewhere there was probably a line, and Coalhouse definitely crossed it with his mind out for vengeance, but still! Mr. Mitchell made a good point by bringing up and considering how militant protesting by a group belonging to the #BlackLivesMatter movement would be perceived today. What really was going on with J.P. Morgan and his death post-Egypt? (I personally wasn't very sure what was really happening after Morgan hightailed it out of Egypt.) Did Younger Brother actually become a more serious character, or is he still cloaked in irony because of his name and other actions later in the novel? It's too much to answer in one blog post, but it's been interesting food for thought.

The Narrator in Ragtime

It's pretty early to be making a blog post on Ragtime already, but I actually think there are several blog-worthy subtopics that were brought up in class discussion, with the most interesting one being the narrator.

Now, if you were in 20th Century Literature last semester, you'll definitely remember the term free indirect discourse--hopefully. It's basically a term that describes third person narration that moves between the consciousnesses of different characters, and fades in and out of those consciousnesses. I definitely got the vibe that a type of free indirect discourse was at play here. Looking only at that beginning paragraph, you wouldn't really see that, and the narrator actually comes off as being somewhat objective--it appears at if they're painting a picture, and are just giving the reader some good ol' facts about what it was like to live back then. However, not soon after in the chapter, we do catch some actual character insight. On page 9, after the infamous Houdini smashes into a pole and is invited in for tea, the novel reads:

"Houdini wanted to undo his collar. He felt trapped by the heavy square furnishings, the drapes and dark rugs, the Oriental silk cushions, the green glass lampshades."

I could totally see how someone could make a case for this just being a third person case for Houdini, but I just found it incredibly noticeable next to sentences that explained the inner workings and thoughts of other characters as well. There is a kind of "fading" in and out of character consciousness here.

Character thoughts aside, I think the question of whether or not the narrator is objective or not is a good one. Like I said, a lot of the information in the novel so far had been presented in a manner that implies that the narrator is neutral, and doesn't really have a... personality? Voice? There's probably a better word for what I'm thinking about, but basically, the narrator appears to be neutral. I really had to slow down my reading and think about the subtext of the "information" we're receiving. There are several examples I had in mind, but the one that sticks out the most is in the second paragraph of the book. We're introduced to Evelyn Nesbit, and her not-so-secret admirer, Mother's Younger Brother. Page 5:

"[Mother's Younger Brother] had closely followed the scandal surrounding her name and had begun to reason that the death of her lover Stanford White and the imprisonment of her husband Harry K. Thaw left her in need of the attentions of a genteel middle-class young man with no money."

This screams 'irony'. Obviously, a bachelor with no money isn't desirable at all; the narrator, at closer inspection, seems to be making a subtle tongue-in-cheek jab at Mother's Younger Brother's attitude. It was definitely funny, and I had a hard time perceiving that comment as truly neutral. There was definitely some sort of tone, and there are even more examples of this elsewhere in our text.

I'm definitely enjoying the novel so far! (At the time of this blog post, I've read up to Chapter 7, not just up to 4; I think I can safely say that I like it and will continue to do so? I hope so!) I'm totally bewildered by how the narrator just throws the reader into the context of the novel, and I don't even recognize half of the historical facets they're bringing up, but somehow it still makes sense enough for me to understand what's happening. With the rest of Ragtime in mind, I'm looking forward to it.