Surely the best-known work by E. L. Doctorow is Ragtime (1974)…. But Doctorow's other two novels, Welcome to Hard Times (1960) and The Book of Daniel (1971), which have been obscured by the commercial hoopla over Ragtime, may in some respects be better pieces of fiction. (p. 397)

The novels are rich in texture and themes, actually too rich to discuss comprehensively here. However, there is a central motif in all three which gives both structure to the plots and a tone of irony to the characterizations. This motif is the idea of history as a repetitive process, almost a cyclical one, in which man is an unwilling, unknowing pawn, easily seduced into a belief in "progress." Doctorow pays detailed, loving attention to the external, concrete facts of cultural history, creating a feeling of uniqueness in time and place. Yet in reality these surface details which smack of growth, change, and differentiation are illusory. We find that beneath them certain patterns of belief and action prevail no matter how much the outer world may seem to change. In two of the books, a repetitive form of music is used as a metaphor for this historical principle. Furthermore, the image of repetition emerges through character development; in all three novels we find a tragedy of revenge.

Like most classic American Westerns, Hard Times has the feel of allegory in it. In our national mythology of the pastoral Eden waiting for us somewhere out toward the setting sun, there is one emotional constant: hope…. Hard Times reverses this standardized mythic concept of the West, bringing our view of the pioneering life a bit closer to the reality of the struggle, violence, and frequent failure that actually prevailed. The novel is dystopian, the story of a failed, sterile Eden.

The narrator, Blue, is Adamic in nature, but despite two falls from apparent grace, he never learns the meaning of evil in himself or others. This is his curse. (pp. 397-98)

Blue always had the feeling that [the town] Hard Times was "certified" as a place in the world, and so when the next season brings a small boom in repopulation and prosperity [after a period of destruction], he feels convinced his faith is well founded. Though at the time he thought continued improvement was certain, he later realizes that the hopefulness of this time was really their best moment. On this point rests one of the novel's central themes. Blue says that somewhere in there "there must have been a moment when we reached what perfection was left to our lives."… [But he shuddered to think that whatever] "perfection was … it maybe was past, silently come and gone, a moment long, just an instant in the shadow of one day, and any fool who was still waiting for it … didn't know what life is."

In essence this is Gatsby's problem revisited: Blue also wants to turn back the clock, to rebuild a past dream by projecting it into the future, but, as Fitzgerald said in The Great Gatsby, "he did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city [the West, the vision of Eden], where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night." The rest of Fitzgerald's prose-poem ending is a literal parallel to Blue's situation. Doctorow is nowhere more succinct in stating the illusion of hopefulness as it projects into the future than when he has Blue tell us, "Like The West, like my life: the color dazzles us, but when it's too late we see what a fraud it is, what a poor pinched-out claim."

In fact, one can say that the novel becomes a masochistic crescendo of recollection as Blue finishes the tale. (p. 399)

Like the sparse landscape and cold light of the [novel's setting on the] Dakota plain, the prose style of Hard Times is lean and simple. Not so in The Book of Daniel, where stylistic complexity is of at least two kinds. One is sheer bulk of information, for whatever the setting may be, whatever the subject of dialogue, we move slowly through a deep snow of words. We feel the very friction in the narrator's own thought process. Another cause of complexity is the shifting of voice between first and third persons, reflecting the narrator's struggle to review experience on both existential and analytic levels, first hand and at some distance.

Why these stylistic choices? Because we have here a political novel told in the voice of a participant in its painful events who wants simultaneously to express his feelings and to understand his experience rationally. The narrator is Daniel Lewin, born Daniel Issacson and born outside the novel as one of the Rosenberg children in the infamous atomic bomb treason case of the McCarthy era. Though the parallels to the facts of this case and the lives of the Rosenberg children are many, they are not perfect, and it would be a mistake to view the novel as "their" story; Doctorow begins with their family situation but imagines in his own way the consequences of such traumas. (pp. 400-01)

Part of the book's moral tension derives from the fact that Daniel is never able to ascertain whether his parents were innocent or guilty. Eventually, though, he becomes if not indifferent to this question then at least ambivalent about the answer. Instead of answering it he arrives at an even more unsettling conclusion: "Of one thing we are sure, everything's elusive."… (p. 401)

Because Daniel works on the premise that "everything is elusive," the book can only be a series of doomed attempts to discover an unavailable truth. The story is very much Daniel's lament for himself, and Whitman's logic at the closing of "Song of Myself" seems to apply directly: "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)" and "Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged, / Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you." Thus it is evident why Doctorow turns to Whitman for one of his epigraphs, a quotation expressing the poet's cosmic role of music maker not only for "accepted victors" but for "conquer'd and slain persons" as well—as though distinctions don't matter.

The density of the style and the psychological tension in the point of view set the stage for thematic developments much like those of Hard Times. History, for instance, is the villain again with its reappearing trends engulfing feeble mankind in delusions of false progress. (pp. 401-02)

The greater part of the entire novel, indeed of all three novels, serves to illustrate [the] antiprogressive idea [exemplified by Artie Sternlicht's wall collage: "Everything that came before is all the same!"]. Daniel studiously travels into one historical subject after another, all somehow at least tangentially related to his parents' case, but he always arrives in the same philosophical port defined for him most precisely by Sternlicht. However, Sternlicht believes that this principle of historical repetition is a consequence of the double-think repression which is seen as inherent in corporate liberalism, the archenemy. (p. 402)

Daniel reviews the sociopolitical background of his parents' execution in a section called "True History of the Cold War: A Raga." He examines from his radical perspective, in line with Sternlicht, the falsehoods, delusions, errors, and vanities of the Cold War, drawing on many scholarly texts such as William A. Williams's The Tragedy of American Foreign Policy. Like Blue in Hard Times who writes history in order to understand himself, Daniel reads it to explain his family's past….

[The] juxtaposition of dual concern for repetition and logical disjunction in Daniel's private life and in America of the fifties suggests why Doctorow calls the "True History of the Cold War" a raga. This Hindu form of devotional music is itself characterized by an emphasis on sequences—of chord progressions, melodic interpolations and rhythmic patterns. Raga taken literally means color or mood and each raga has a definite ethical or emotional significance. The string instrument called tamboura sets up a monophonic continuous tonal horizon as a background for the sitar's complex overlay of melodic development. Given this musical structure as metaphor, we can infer that Daniel's "True History" is analogous to one of the many ragas, and therefore it is only one version of cold war history, simply his version at the occasion of this "playing" or telling. Thus the title "True History" is ironic to say the least, and we are brought back again to the thematic idea that "everything is elusive," most of all historical truth. (p. 403)

[When he meets with Selig Mindisch, his parents' betrayer,] Daniel sounds again like Blue in Hard Times, also like two important characters in Ragtime. The rendezvous with Selig Mindisch takes place at Disneyland, and Doctorow's narrative method here is an essay in the new journalism at its very best, cutting satirically through the elaborate veneer of illusions to the dark heart of latent cultural values.

Daniel explains, for instance, that Disneyland's cartoon mentality is an attenuation of historical reality reinterpreted to preclude individual confrontations with painful facts and ambiguities in the past. The exhibition on pirates ignores the effects on mercantile trade of this kind of professional criminal; instead we see romanticized buccaneers…. Disneyland is a fantastic tribute to historical mindlessness, and there couldn't be a better setting for Daniel's final confrontation with his old nemesis: the elusiveness of truth. (pp. 403-04)

In Ragtime Doctorow indulges in what earlier writers of "romance" like Twain called "dressing up the tale." Though again we witness an almost encyclopedic survey of descriptive facts about the life of a historical period (1902–1915), this overlay of apparent objectivity is just that: a slick veneer of illusions. Below this glossy surface, however, is another impressively successful narrative technique treating essentially the same themes. The hallmark of the narrative form here is a fanciful intertwining of "real" historical figures … with fictional characters. As in romantic history itself (Bancroft's Montcalm and Wolf comes to mind), Doctorow's imagination takes us on a voyeuristic expedition into the private, psychological lives of people we could never really encounter in this way. (p. 404)

Again the point of view, in political terms, is that history, especially the American brand, is far from a progressive evolution toward peace among men. The book is an indictment of the recurrent malignancies of spirit beneath the period's chimerical technological progress and social harmony….

Life in the present in Ragtime is a continuous recapitulation of the past. Doctorow says of this period in particular, "The value of the duplicable event was everywhere perceived," and these recurring events become metaphors of history's capacity for redundance. The "duplicable events" are such small things as ice cream soda fountains in every town, all made of Belgian marble, or advertisements everywhere for "Painless Parker the Dentist." Other larger examples are the predictable patterns of baseball, [and] the stock prejudicial images in the Anglo mind of Negroes and immigrants…. (p. 405)

But above all this there is a double apotheosis of the phenomenon, the first half of which is Henry Ford's system of mass-produced Model T automobiles…. The other half of the apotheosis is J. P. Morgan's elaborately researched theory: "There are universal patterns of order and repetition that give meaning to the activity of this planet." One of these patterns is reincarnation, and Morgan believes he and Ford "are instrumentation[s] in our modern age of trends in human identity that affirm the oldest wisdom in the world." Morgan has spent millions to prove this theory, but Ford discovered the same idea in a twenty-five-cent booklet bought at the Franklin Novelty Company, so that again we see how irrelevant the surface details can be. Only the underlying forms are important.

Having established this concern for truth and illusion in our historical imagination, Doctorow can proceed to weave a story to demonstrate it in action. A character named Coalhouse Walker appears….

He plays "Wall St. Rag" by Scott Joplin. "Small clear chords hung in the air like flowers. The melodies were like bouquets. There seemed to be no other possibilities for life than those delineated by the music." And what are the characteristics of this music? A left hand ostinato conveying a distinct basis of fundamental repetition and a right handed liveliness allowing for a wide range of improvisation on the melodic line. Thus we can sense that the structure of the music once more becomes symbolic of the historical process: endless recurrence under a distracting facade of individualistic variation. At the very end of the novel, when "the era of Ragtime had run out," Doctorow nails down his point by musing: "as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano." (p. 406)

An interesting possibility of interpretation [of the novel, and especially of Coalhouse's need for revenge] is that the entire Coalhouse story is a cipher for a tragic recurrent pattern in American history. The embattled Negro, drawn into upward mobility through imitation of high white culture, is beaten down for racist fun by white trash; the system of justice, even when used in the Negro's defense by white bourgeois sympathizers, does no good; the Negro turns radical and threatens to destroy white private property representing the social and financial success no longer available to him; everybody except the Negro and his revolutionary colleagues wonders why; the Negro is caught and killed.

We find, then, a background feeling of slow but unstoppable repetition in the way things go, and a foreground of hope and mad determination to make things change. This is almost exactly what appears structurally and thematically in Hard Times and Daniel. There are other subplots in Ragtime, and Doctorow handles them all deftly. One notices that in these subsidiary episodes too the experience of endless recurrence, often in fruitless pursuit of impossible goals, predominates. (p. 407)

In their quests for revenge, Doctorow's main characters seek to make things the way they were, and in so doing reenact a common pattern of fruitless human behavior. A final general inference then is that Doctorow's vision is a dark, almost Melvillean one—not morbid, jaded, or exhausted, but finally pessimistic or at least resigned about hopeless human nature. Paradoxically, in the very attention he gives to describing the tangible stuff of social life in a specific time and place, he finds moments of beauty, passion, and happiness, each with its own inherent value. Nonetheless, behind it all, like muzak no one really hears, like an unfelt but life-sustaining heartbeat, there are the recurrences of history, the unalterable instincts of human behavior, the mandala of self on which we all turn toward a future like the past no one understands. (p. 408)

David Emblidge, "Marching Backward into the Future: Progress as Illusion in Doctorow's Novels," in Southwest Review (© 1977 by Southern Methodist University Press), Autumn, 1977, pp. 397-409.