Like U.S.A., Ragtime contains a satiric commentary upon the development of American society in the early years of the twentieth century…. While Doctorow evinces a far keener awareness of the problems stemming from sexual and racial oppression in the prewar period, he and Dos Passos are similarly concerned with formulating a radical critique of capitalism. At the same time both authors infuse into their portraits a curious admixture of nostalgia…. (p. 86)

In addition, despite some evident disparities in technique, Ragtime and U.S.A. have a number of crucial structural elements in common. The anonymous Boy who provides Doctorow's most important angle of fictional vision—and who might indeed be the narrator himself as a child—performs a function very like that of Dos Passos' Camera Eye: both respond with almost excruciating sensitivity to the callousness of their historical worlds and thus furnish a naive but clear-eyed standard of ethical judgment for the narratives in which they appear. Moreover, while he has eliminated the dramatic breaks in narrative that characterize the earlier trilogy, Doctorow often adopts the broadly ranging public stance of Dos Passos' newsreels and offers a streamlined version of the simultanéisme which his predecessor had learned from the Cubists, the Italian Futurists, and such experimenters with cinematic montage as Eisenstein…. What is more, although many "real" historical figures enter into the plot of Doctorow's novel with an audacity undreamed in Dos Passos' more somber work, Ragtime also contains numerous sketches of historical personages … who, in the characteristic Dos Passos manner, remain peripheral to the main action of the fiction. Finally, the spectrum of American society reflected in the stories of the nameless Anglo-Saxon and Jewish families and in the dramatic saga of the black Coalhouse Walker furnishes a broadly representative microcosm of society [as did U.S.A.]. In short, the four-part structure of U.S.A. survives in Ragtime, although in compressed and integrated form.

Dos Passos' trilogy has influenced not only the shape but also, I believe, much of the specific content of Doctorow's novel. There appears throughout Ragtime a multitude of characters and incidents, both major and minor, which contain distinct echoes for those familiar with U.S.A. For instance, the portrait of the prewar radical movement so central to the rhetoric of The Forty-Second Parallel is also sketched in Ragtime. (pp. 87-8)

The very neatness of the parallelism between Dos Passos and Doctorow, however, makes all the more striking the important differences between the treatments of history in the two works. For history provides the frame of the "plot" in U.S.A. with a solidity and confidence wholly alien to the conception of Ragtime…. (pp. 89-90)

[Doctorow's "plot"] is patently fictional. For all his boldness in making "characters" of historical figures like Houdini and Emma Goldman, Doctorow treats history ultimately as motif—what one critic has called "post-Passos pastiche"—and relies upon Coalhouse Walker's supremely fictional clash with the racist establishment to provide his novel with a sense of direction and a point of climax. It bears mention here that the story of Coalhouse Walker is, like the rest of Ragtime, cleverly derivative; but its source is not in historical fact but, rather, in fiction: in a little-known 1930's novel by George Milburn entitled Catalogue and in Heinrich Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas…. There are many parallels with Kleist's tale in Ragtime, starting with Doctorow's daring pun on "Kohlhaas" in his own hero's name. The significance of these sources lies, however, not so much in what they reveal about Doctorow's literary tastes as in what they indicate about the relative weights which he assigns to historical and fictional elements in his narrative. The first half of Ragtime may provide a highly entertaining survey of notorious historical figures of the day, but it is wilfully chaotic in its sudden shifts of character and locale: only in the second half, with the mounting crisis of Coalhouse Walker's story, does the novel attain momentum. However amusing history may be, Doctorow seems to be saying, it does not provide a sufficiently coherent—or, perhaps, merely a sufficiently interesting—pattern around which to structure a causally related train of events. No Sacco and Vanzetti climaxes for Doctorow: fiction—albeit a borrowed one—must provide the model for his plot.

This subordination of the historical to the fictional calls to mind Thackeray's rather cavalier treatment of historical particulars in Esmond. Can Ragtime thus be seen as representing a return to the practice of the classical historical novel? Not quite. In the first place, historical figures like Kutuzov or the Pretender may be "wrenched" from strict historical fidelity in order to accommodate the demands of fiction, but such departures from the historical record must be confined to the realm of plausibility. Events so audaciously "invented" as Freud's and Jung's trip through the Tunnel of Love at Coney Island or Emma Goldman's massage of Evelyn Nesbit clearly violate this canon of historical decorum. Doctorow is doing something quite different here: he is utilizing the reader's encyclopedic knowledge that a historical Freud, Jung, Goldman, and Nesbit did in fact exist in order to pose an open challenge to the reader's preconceived notions about what historical "truth" actually is. Asked on one occasion whether Goldman and Nesbit ever really met, Doctorow has boldly replied, "They have now." (pp. 93-5)

In the second place, Doctorow diverges from classical historical fiction in his treatment of the novel's main fictional personality. For fundamental to the strategy of a Thackeray or a Tolstoy is a necessary condition that the principal invented characters be, in the fullest sense, "typical" of the age which they inhabit and illuminate…. While the anonymous Anglo-Saxon and immigrant families in Ragtime are clearly representative of their age, it is significant that Coalhouse Walker, the novel's hero, is in no way "typical" of the prewar years; nor is the climactic event of the novel a plausible occurrence of the times…. Doctorow, it seems, has deliberately overlooked many of the fictional possibilities inherent in the historical materials at hand. The terrorist bombings of the "Coalhouse" gang, their designation of themselves as the "Provisional American Government," their takeover of the Morgan mansion as a symbolic political gesture—these are elements more distinctly reminiscent of the 1960's than of the ragtime era. Both the hero and the climactic event of the novel are, I think, outrageously and deliberately anachronistic. Doctorow is commenting upon the age of Wilson by importing a dramatic example from the age of Nixon, and his point is, quite clearly, that the forms of present-day racism have their roots in the past. While Doctorow's ethical strategy here is effective, however, it also carries the implication that historical change is itself chimerical. A primary goal of most nineteenth-century historical novelists was to recreate a bygone era in the fullness of its specificity: reacting against the eighteenth-century notion of "generic man" … they implicitly endorsed a progressive view of history and sought to uncover what was uniquely characteristic of a chosen epoch in the past. In Ragtime, however, Doctorow seems to be implying that accurate representation of the past is less crucial than revelation of the haunting continuity of the past in the present…. As a "typical" historical representative of the ragtime era Coalhouse Walker is a fraud; but as a means of commenting upon the racism continuing in our own time he projects an alarming degree of truth.

What I hope to have demonstrated thus far is that both U.S.A. and Ragtime, in different ways, represent a significant departure from the form and outlook of classical historical fiction. Although Dos Passos creates a typical and microcosmic fictional world, he subordinates the fates of his invented characters to the "plot" of history itself. Although Doctorow subordinates historical particulars to a structural pattern which is clearly fictional, he aims less at constructing a fully convincing representative picture of the Progressive era than at enhancing the historical self-consciousness of his readers. What the two writers share, in contradistinction to nineteenth-century historical novelists, is a reduced reliance upon the mimetic illusion and an increased tendency to intrude "documentary" particulars into the realm of fiction. Where they diverge is in the effect which they extract from these particulars: Dos Passos frames his narrative around facts which are ordinarily held to be "true," in the sense that they are externally verifiable; whereas Doctorow treats with equal aplomb facts that are "true" and those that are "created," thus calling into question our concept of factuality and, indeed, of history itself.

Before we investigate the important differences between U.S.A. and Ragtime as works of historical fiction, it is useful to establish their common derivation from an ancestry which predates the classical historical novel of the nineteenth-century—namely, that grouping of factual and pseudofactual narratives popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, best typified in the work of Defoe. Works like A Journal of the Plague Year and Moll Flanders are "historical" not in the usual sense of the word—i.e., as evocations of past eras—but in the sense that they make an implicit, if at times false, claim to veracity…. The complexity of this grouping of narratives, however—and its important bearing upon the work of Dos Passos and Doctorow—stems from the variety of ends to which this illusion of factuality can be directed. In Moll Flanders, for example, the narrator claims to be a "real" person, but the historical plausibility of her tale collapses rapidly and the reader almost immediately recognizes her pseudofactual ontology: Moll is, in the fullest sense, a fraud, though one that is to be openly acknowledged and enjoyed as such. The link between this narrative approach and what Doctorow is doing in Ragtime is evident. In A Journal of the Plague Year, on the other hand, Defoe utilizes a number of the tools of fiction, yet the ultimate goal of his work is to evoke by imaginative means a historically true picture of London at the time of the plague. Here the reader willingly accepts numerous fictional accretions, such as the lengthy story of Thomas and John, as reinforcing elements in a work whose principal effect remains primarily factual. The kinship between this strategy and Dos Passos' achievement in U.S.A. should be equally apparent. In addition, there appeared at this time a number of falsified biographies and travel journals, of which Madame d'Aulnoy's The Lady's Travels into Spain furnishes a good example, that baldly lied about the historicity of their content and presented imagined incidents as externally verifiable fact. Dos Passos clearly has little relation to this tradition…. The way in which Doctorow flirts with true and false "facts" in Ragtime, however, suggests a possible relation to these earlier "false true documents."… (pp. 95-8)

Interestingly enough, both Dos Passos and Doctorow have been most willing to acknowledge their indebtedness to Defoe….

[On the other hand, Doctorow] has been most explicit about his sense of alienation from the school of "documentary" writers (who have also been called "new journalists" and "nonfiction novelists"). His plan in Ragtime, he states, is to "deify" facts: "give 'em all sorts of facts—made up facts, distorted facts. It's the reverse of Truman Capote. I see all these new journalists as guys on the other side."… In fundamental outlook, however, Doctorow may not be as distant from Capote as he believes. Georg Lukács, discussing the writer's alienation from history in the modern period, has observed that, once the writer loses faith in the direction of history, it either becomes "a collection and reproduction of interesting facts about the past" or "a chaos to be ordered as one likes." (p. 102)

There is no denying that Doctorow's particular method of playing fast and loose with the materials of history has a definite appeal—as does that of a number of other contemporary historical novelists. In his extreme self-consciousness, however, there is also a certain mannered quality which we may occasionally find bothersome. It would not be quite accurate to say that Ragtime is decadent, since it is clearly radical in outlook and proposes an unillusioned confrontation with class, race, and sexual oppression in the nation's past—and present. But if Doctorow's mannerism is not itself decadent, it is, like all mannerism, associated with a period of decadence; if it does not suggest that history is meaningless, it does imply that the meanings we find in it are chimerical and at best highly subjective. What I ultimately find disturbing about Ragtime—and about many other works of contemporary historical fiction, whether "apocalyptic" or "documentary"—is its underlying postulate that whatever coherence emerges from the represented historical world is attributable to the writer's power as teller of his story, with the result that the process of historical reconstruction itself, rather than what is being represented, comes to the fore…. For the majority of novelists and historians writing today, history does indeed seem to inhabit a crazy house, and the ingenious strategies which they adopt to uncover a method in its madness bear testament to the fundamental alienation from history experienced by even the most resilient imaginations of our time. (pp. 104-05)