Ragtime (Style)

Style

Point of View

The point of view of this novel is uncertain. The prevailing consciousness is certainly that of the Little Boy — his personality is explained in detail, and much of the information that is given could have reached him, either from direct experience or through secondary sources, such as his uncle's diaries or newspaper clippings. When the narrative places itself in time as speaking "nearly fifty years after Houdini's death," it leaves open the possibility that the grown-up boy is telling the story (Houdini died in 1926, nearly fifty years before the book was published). On the other hand, there are many details here that the Little Boy really could not know, such as the intimate thoughts of prominent figures like J. Pierpont Morgan and Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Throughout the book the narrator speaks as an unidentified "we," presumably representing America. The narrator is given a distinct persona in the last chapter, when it speaks in the first person: "Poor Father, I see his final exploration." Contradictions abound, but most of the evidence indicates that, if the narrator is a particular person (as opposed to the omniscient narrator, who tells the story but is not part of it), it is probably the Little Boy.

Zeitgeist ("spirit of the Time")

More important to the success of this novel than any particular characters or plotlines is the way that it creates a convincing sense of what life was like in America in the first years of the twentieth century. Although no novel or historical work could ever give readers the experience of exactly what it was like then, Ragtime struggles to make clear what the issues of social concern were and who the celebrities were, in order to give the flavor of the time. The structure of the book, with quick scenes and short chapters covering a wide variety of people and situations, helps readers to feel the new century's spirit of motion and confusion. One of the most irrelevant, yet symbolic events in the book involves novelist Theodore Dreiser, who appears in one paragraph at the end of Chapter 4 and then never again: "One day he decides his chair was facing the wrong direction. He gets up to move it, then moves it again, then again. Throughout the night Dreiser turned his chair in circles seeking the proper alignment." The uneven motion of the book and its characters has been compared to this exasperated circling. Each of the real-life people chosen to represent this time period — Harry Houdini, Harry K. Thaw, Sigmund Freud, Booker T. Washington, Emma Goldman, J. P. Morgan, and the rest — adds a slightly different, unique color to the overall picture, with no single story being more important than the overall effect.

Irony

This novel has a strong flair for irony, setting readers up to expect one thing but then leading to developments that, while logical, are quite different than expected. Usually, these reversals seem to deflate pomposity. Houdini, with the best intentions toward all humanity, offers money to subway workers who escaped a catastrophe, introducing himself as an "escapologist," and he is lifted off his feet and thrown out of the hospital. Morgan assembles America's wealthiest men to trade wisdom, and he finds them concerned with digestion, dozing off and muttering inanities: "Without exception the dozen most powerful men in America looked like horse's asses," he concludes. Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose death triggered the global catastrophe of World War I, is so befuddled by his formal, ceremonious meeting with Houdini that he thinks the airplane Houdini brings with him is his own invention. After a lifetime of actions against the government, the event that leads to Emma Goldman's deportation is her commenting about the Coalhouse Walker affair. J. P. Morgan, seeking eternal knowledge in the pyramid, instead finds bedbugs and catches the cold that kills him. Any good novel will have a number of surprises, in order to avoid being predictable, but Ragtime consistently uses reversal of expectation to point out the weakness of the old ruling order, although the book's ironic tone continually pretends to be upholding the old notions.