the mass (it was and is a popular novel) and in some sense unduplicable (although many novels mix historical "fact" and fiction fancifully, they also aspire to be original achievements). And when we become aware of how like an automobile we are and how like an automobile a novel is, we can discover more of the individuality of ourselves and ofRagtime.

Another way of stating my point is to say that Ragtime emphasizes the social origin of human individuality and of art. Just as the Model T is a product of a mass of working-class laborers, all the characters in Ragtime, all the readers of the novel, and the novel itself, are presented as products of a mass of contributing forces. But this societal basis to reality does not destroy characters or readers or the novel; it simply shifts the rules by which we discover individualized significance. Even as we learn that Evelyn Nesbit's celebrity is an industrial construction, even as we realize that we readers have been trained to ignore many versions of American history, and even as we struggle with the multiple narrative points of view in the novel, we are given a new, more complex, more valid understanding of human personality, of the reader's role in the production of meaning, of authorship, and perhaps even of the American automobile. Martin Green has accused Doctorow of encouraging "nostalgia" for the early automobile, but I think Doctorow's treatment of the automobile demonstrates a fascinatingly complex understanding of the automobile's meaning.

Some historical background might make it easier to recognize the positive aspects of the automobile in Ragtime. In many ways, American culture has associated the automobile with freedom, and the Model T would be an especially good symbol of human freedom since it was, as Reynold M. Wik points out, "especially designed to travel over difficult terrain." Warren Belasco has even described the period from 1900 to 1920 (roughly the time period covered by Ragtime) as the era of anarchic "gypsying," of the use of automobiles to travel freely around the country without planning and to camp each night without expenses. Belasco concludes that "the automobile industry became the backbone of modern industrial capitalism, yet it was born in a spirit of rebellion against that system." If we recall that only 8,000 automobiles were registered in America in 1900 and that 8,000,000 were registered in 1920 [according to Mark S. Foster in his article "The Automobile and the City," in The Automobile and American Culture, edited by David L. Lewis and Laurence Goldstein, 1983], we might conclude reasonably that the automobile symbolizes an explosion of rebelliousness on the part of Americans....

The automobile in Ragtime often seems to be symbolically opposed to the sea, with the auto suggesting humanity's technological control and the sea suggesting chaos, irrationality, emotion. But in at least two significant instances, the symbols come together in ways that suggest positive qualities for the automobile—when Coalhouse Walker's car enters the Firehouse Pond, and when Mother drives herself, the Little Boy, and Coalhouse Walker III to Prout' s Neck, Maine, home of Winslow Homer, who had once painted light associated with chaos:

Homer painted the light. It gave the sea a heavy dull menace and shone coldly on the rocks and shoals of the New England coast. There were unexplained shipwrecks and brave towline rescues. Odd things went on in lighthouses and in shacks nestled in the wild beach plum. Across America sex and death were barely distinguishable.

The early reference to Homer is significant because, during the Atlantic City storm that seems to bring Mother and Tateh together once and for all, she resembles "in her wet form the ample woman in the Winslow Homer painting who is being rescued from the sea by towline." I would suggest that the movement of the car towards water in both the Coalhouse Walker story and the story of the New Rochelle family symbolizes a complex interaction of forces in which the automobile, like the ocean to which it may seem to be opposed, is associated with some of the positive aspects of chaos.

As we turn to the issue of how the automobile provides a model for the achievement of human individuality, it may seem difficult to decide how seriously we are to take Coalhouse Walker Jr. as a heroic figure in what is sometimes considered the one traditional plot line in Ragtime. According to Martin Green, Doctorow's attitude toward Coalhouse Walker and toward Sarah is "uncritically romantic" and therefore flawed. While it may be true that Coalhouse Walker "defends his personal dignity fanatically, refusing to bend at all in the face of money-power and racial prejudice" [according to David S. Gross in his article "Tales of Obscene Power," in E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations, edited by Richard Trenner, 1983], it is also true that he has accepted the dominant culture's belief that possessions like a Model T can add to his status and dignity, and when his car is desecrated and pushed into a pond by Willie Conklin and other volunteer firemen, who significantly have not yet made the switch from horses to motors, we may wonder how much Doctorow expects us to want Walker to regain the car. For Leonard and Barbara Quart, it is "a bit absurd" for Coalhouse Walker to be willing "to sacrifice and destroy lives with no larger political end than redeeming his car and gaining personal respect." Barbara L. Estrin makes this issue of Coalhouse Walker's heroism a major part of the novel's point. The story of Coalhouse Walker's occupation of the Morgan Museum "is undermined by the pervading feeling that its outcome was so predictable, its conclusion so forecast by the forces of a society bent on the preservation of the industrial system, that the action comes to nothing." Because of the "system of interchangeable parts" that allows the easy replacement of Coalhouse Walker's car, Walker's death is unnecessary, "his death, like his revolution, a meaningless sacrifice. Nothing was changed by it." All the characters of Ragtime are, according to Estrin, "cogs on the wheels of time," and thus the novel seems to say "that we are all expendable."

I would like to suggest that Coalhouse Walker grows into his individuality, that it is precisely when Mother's Younger Brother is astonished to see Walker equating a mere car with justice that Walker has achieved heroism. It is crucial to the novel that Coalhouse Walker Jr. receives a car that is indeed a duplicate of his original Model T with the Pantasote top and at the same time a different car. Surely the car is more significant in its replacement form because the whole of New York's political establishment is watching it. The remade car is also different from the original in the sense that it is not produced by assembly line: "Fire Chief Conklin ... piece by piece dismantled the Ford and made a new Ford from the chassis up." One might wonder whether Doctorow is claiming that this car produced by an individual is in some sense morally superior, or whether Doctorow is arguing for a return to the individual craftsman, and my answer would be yes but also no—it is impossible (following a logic that the novel suggests) to have individual craftsmanship, because Willie Conklin becomes the mass of society, "so ordinary as to be like all men," and, at least while he is building the car, he "become[s] Pierpont Morgan, the most important individual of his time." Even as Coalhouse Walker's demand is met, another Model T comes out of mass production. At the same time, it is worth noting that if a Ford cannot be produced by only one individual, not even Henry Ford can make a Ford by himself. The view that presents the Model T as a product of the entire society frees the automobile from Ford's tyranny to some extent. And there is something of a victory for Coalhouse even as the police equate him with the replaced car, complete with what might be considered the symbolically crucial customizing Pantasote top. He exchanges his life for the car and for the lives of his band of revolutionaries, all in a sense duplicates of Walker who call themselves Coalhouse.

The issues of the establishment of selfhood in a world of mass production are spelled out even more complexly in the story of the narrator, the Little Boy. Ragtime claims, through the Little Boy as narrator, that it is essential that one perceive (and maintain) the differences within apparent duplicates, as well as the similarities in things that seem chaotically dissimilar. Chapter 15 is crucial to an understanding of the Little Boy's fondness both for change, as taught by his grandfather, and for pattern. Not enough has been said critically about the significance for the boy of minor changes within pattern, of the rare occasion when the hairbrush or window does not remain still, of the slight changes that prove "even statues did not remain the same." The Little Boy seems to understand that the slight difference within sameness is the metaphor for his own individuality. Much has been made of the Little Boy's fondness for baseball because, he says, "The same thing happens over and over." According to Barbara L. Estrin, among others, baseball is a prime example of the sameness that rather depressingly underlies the appearance of change. But even here we see some delight in novelty, for as soon as the Little Boy praises the pattern, he is excited by the unusual occurrence of a foul ball that ends up in his hands. The point surely is that the Little Boy can always see both sides, and therein lies his power. Much has been said about the boy's vision of a "macrocephalic image of himself” in Houdini's headlight as a sign that the Little Boy is overly subjective, and some readers have been troubled by such a possibility. Barbara Foley criticizes Ragtime for implying that historical meaning as produced by this narrator is "chimerical and at best highly subjective," based on the notion "that whatever coherence emerges from the represented historical world is attributable to the writer's power as teller of his story." The Little Boy's amazing and initially obscure advice for Houdini, that he warn the Archduke Ferdinand of his coming assassination and of WWI, may even seem significant primarily for its pointlessness. In Estrin's interesting reading, the Little Boy's warning in the first chapter is a sort of failed authorial intrusion demonstrating the power of the machine over us all:

With the insight he gains from subsequent experience, the little boy, pre-figuring the storyteller he later becomes, informs the magician. We live our lives in the illusion that we can change things, in the hope that we amount to more than insignificant parts of a vast machine moving inexorably toward doom. The child anticipates, simultaneously as the narrator reconstructs, history.... "Warn the Duke," he says, sounding a command that might alter the course of the novel we are about to read.

Although I do not agree with Barbara Cooper's description of the narrative persona of Ragtime as "anonymous," I agree with her idea that the narrator "transcends the limitations of a single human perspective." I would like to emphasize the idea that the narrator's ability to combine points of view is more nearly the ground of his selfhood than a dilution of it. The narrator is at once a product of his time and an individual exercising some effect upon his time. His visions are not all of the sort that ends the first chapter and that Houdini somewhat pathetically reproduces near the novel's end. More should be made of the fact that the Little Boy's eyes are compared to a "school globe" and of the line in the description of Sarah's funeral that insists emphatically that the boy sees not just himself but the rest of this society: Sarah's hearse "was so highly polished the boy could see in its rear doors a reflection of the entire street." This line suggests that the Little Boy's visions are at once internal and external. Even in the episode in which the Little Boy stares at Houdini's headlight and sees himself, we can find more than an indication that the boy is at once able to predict world events and to be obsessed with his own head. Before he realizes that Houdini's car is approaching, the Little Boy equates the car visually with a fly. He fixes "his gaze on a bluebottle fly traversing the screen in a way that made it appear to be coming up the hill from North Avenue. The fly flew off. An automobile was coming up the hill from North Avenue." Perhaps the fascination with the fly is the result of the fly's possession of multiple eyes, in which case the boy's fascination with the car seems to be related to the automobile's multiplicities. The automobile in this passage suggests the value of multiple perspectives, not just the Little Boy's perspective. The narrator's possession of mystical powers seems far-fetched to some readers, but it does function to combine the options of reading Ragtime as mass-produced and of reading it as the production of an individual author. Although Geoffrey Galt Harpham says that the novel has "no consistent or even possible narrative persona," surely the key to understanding the narrative voice is in noticing, as Harpham himself points out, that the narrator "materializes miraculously at the very end as an older narrator." The point, I believe, is not so much that the Little Boy "will grow up to write the narrative" [as Paul Levine writes in his book E. L. Doctorow, 1985], as that he writes the narrative in order to grow up, that the construction of the novel is the construction of its creator as well, that the Little Boy achieves genuine individuality in duplicating—with a difference—the data produced by the assembly-line of ragtime America. Harpham claims that Mother and Tateh "most conspicuously" enjoy the "fate" of a "happy ending" as they "achieve individuation by mastering the processes of replication." While I accept the direction of Harpham's argument here, it also seems true that achievement and mastery are terms better applied to the Little Boy or Coalhouse than to Mother and Tateh, and Harpham does label the Little Boy the novel's "most successful character."

Angela Hague has argued that the duplicated event is "a way of overcoming—and, paradoxically, exemplifying—the fluidity of reality" and that the Little Boy's "attempt" at "self-duplication ... accomplishes the negation of his own distinct personality." When he gazes into a mirror, the Little Boy feels that

there were two selves facing one another, neither of which could claim to be the real one. The sensation was of being disembodied. He was no longer anything exact as a person. He had the dizzying feeling of separating from himself endlessly.

We need not consider this vision of multiplicity any more valid than the opposing sense of selfhood, however. It may be true that for a youngster, a sense of a fluid self is closer to the truth than the understanding such a child might have about wholeness, but it still ought to be possible to believe that the Little Boy as an adult will be able to balance the fluid and static impressions of the self. I think that Hague is absolutely correct in pointing out that motion pictures "both contradict and reinforce" the Little Boy's beliefs about change, but I am inclined to consider Doctorow to be more pleased than displeased about such a state of affairs.

The socialization of authorship involved in seeing a novel as an auto operated by a narrative persona at once himself and everybody is not all that different from what Doctorow [in his essay "False Documents," in E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations, 1983] describes as the traditional novelistic device of "gaining authority for the narrative" through the dissociation of the individual author from it. Just as we may have more faith in a car produced by collective effort, we may trust the novel that presents the views of everyone in society, at least by implication. Even Barbara L. Estrin admits that Ragtime presents mass production as nothing new, that "it emerges simply as a different form of what existed long ago." It would seem to follow that the automobile cannot represent a decline in civilization, even in Estrin's reading; that it represents the duplication with a modern wrinkle of the ways in which human beings have always achieved meaning. Ragtime uses the automobile to suggest how we can satisfy our desire for individuality in spite of the societal forces demanding uniformity.

Source: Marshall Bruce Gentry, "Ragtime as Auto Biography," in Kansas Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4, Fall, 1989, pp. 105-112.