[Ragtime] is distinguished from most other music by its use of rhythm, its syncopation. As the pianist opposes syncopations in his right hand against a precise and regularly accented bass, the delayed and misplaced accents and their conjunction with regular meters set up the complex polyrhythms of ragtime. These subtle conflicting rhythms with their own free "inner voices" provide both the structural and metaphorical basis for E. L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime….

At first glance Doctorow's novel may be "simplified" … by dividing it into three movements, each with its own meaning: the families of Father and Mother …, of Tateh and Mameh …, of Coalhouse Walker Jr., his fiancee Sarah, and their son. Gradually—for we "do not play this piece fast. It is never right to play Ragtime fast"—the movements and the families merge into a projected picture of "Our Gang" at the end of the novel.

But in reading Ragtime in this fashion and in following the movements of the three families, one immediately notices the disproportionate amount of time (nearly twice as much) devoted to Coalhouse Walker and his family than to the other two…. Why does Doctorow hold the Coalhouse Walker note for so long, playing it as an insistent driving bass, and given the context of the novel, is the time division "proper" to complete the "sense" intended? (p. 302)

[The] importance of Coalhouse within the novel concerns his Model T Ford, Willie Conklin and J. P. Morgan….

Coalhouse's reaction to the destruction of his car [presumably by the volunteer fire company led by Conklin] transforms him into a legendary figure, as he responds to a situation that appears peculiarly American—with its racial implications, with its obsessiveness with private property, and with its issues of law and order. Yet the entire incident is borrowed nearly wholesale from Heinrich Kleist's short novel Michael Kohlhaas, first published in 1808. (p. 304)

Doctorow's legerdemain in transforming Kleist's novel into the Coalhouse legend is a tour de force. Like Coalhouse's men, our loyalty is to him, the injustice done to him is done to us, and we begin to think of ourselves collectively as Coalhouse. (p. 305)

When Doctorow turned to Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas as the source of his own Coalhouse story, he knew what he was about. First of all, he recognized the universality of its theme, how injustice breeds polarity, so that the most "upright" of men can at the same time be the "most terrible." Sarah sees the violence inherent in "principle"; it costs nothing less than life. In addition, Doctorow saw in Kleist's novel the conflict between an old order and a new…. In Kleist's novel the stability of the old order, if it ever existed other than in fiction, is dead, and the new order is one of violence and injustice. Doctorow explores the same problem. Coalhouse does not conform to the stereotypical old order as Father perceives it; he plays ragtime by Scott Joplin, not coon songs. But coon songs were both fiction and fact: they conformed to the needs and fears of white men at the same time they were satirizing them. The fictional order believed in by Father is disrupted by the historical fact of the invention of the Model T Ford, but we might say that the Ford itself takes on fictive, or perhaps more accurately mythic qualities, with its principle of interchangeability behind it. As Father says, it is ridiculous for the automobile to control one's life, but in life as well as in fiction, we know this to be too true. One way or another, "We all Coalhouse!"

Kleist provides not only the outline of a legend for Doctorow but the basis of form not too far removed from his "Joplinesque" style. For Kleist's fiction cuts across historical facts in a style that Thomas Mann termed "totally matter-of-fact yet contorted … a style full of involutions, periodic and complex." Mann states: "Kohlhaas seems to me to have a peculiar relevance to the present time, when apathy toward the law, callousness toward injustice, a limp acceptance of 'the way things are' exercise a paralyzing influence all over the world. Kleist shows us, incidentally, with a superb, mordant humor, the predicament into which a society accustomed to constant abuse of the law is thrown by a man who refuses to put up with such abuse…."

I think Doctorow would agree with Mann and intends his own Coalhouse story, both in form and content, to be the insistent driving bass of Ragtime. It is not played carelessly, but given its proper time. The effect of Doctorow's Ragtime is maintained by his "scrupulously observing the ties" between Coalhouse Walker Jr. and the Model T Ford and the other notes in the novel. It is the bass which provides the structural framework in Ragtime against which the syncopations are measured; under those "driving notes" it is Coalhouse who plays so powerfully on our emotions with his passion for justice. Because Doctorow plays "slowly" and does not "vamp," we catch the "swing" of his Ragtime. To paraphrase Joplin, when he spoke of ragtime well-played, I do not find any "imperfect rendering" of the notes of the novel. Its playing completes the sense intended. (pp. 307-08)