of history who die inRagtime are Archduke Franz Ferdinand and J. P. Morgan. The Archduke is an obscure and comical figure. He is weighed down with the silly outdated uniform of the future leader of the outdated Austro-Hungarian empire, which was to fall apart after his assassination in 1914.

Modern readers are amused by his plumed helmet and flat-top crewcut and big waxy moustache. Having been brought out to an airfield to watch Houdini fly an airplane, and never having seen a plane before, and having not, presumably, been a follower of the vaudeville circuit, he reasonably assumed that Houdini invented the contraption he was flying. In the real world, the Archduke's death triggered the horrors of modern warfare and was directly responsible for shifts in power that brought the world the Third Reich, Vietnam and Sarajevo, but within the context of the book the loss of this poor befuddled man, whose first reaction to his own assassination was "The day is ruined," is just another interesting detail. J. P. Morgan comes off as being a little more worth our sympathy, if only because the story spends quite a bit of space tracking his thoughts. He dies old and content—"he was far from unhappy, having concluded that his physical deterioration was exactly the sign for which he had been waiting." Morgan, a staunch believer in reincarnation, could not wait to die, so that he could be back on Earth again that much sooner.

One of the reasons that death is so undisturbing in this book is the recurring imagery of either life after death or an afterlife. It is not much of a book for symbolism, but there is mythology in the air, and among mankind's strongest myths are those that involve people who went to the other side and then came back. Here Doctorow presents his readers with the Myth of the Baby Who Grew in the Garden. It would be too simplistic to call this Christ-imagery, because we are not told what the baby grew up to be like, but we do know that he came out of his grave, and that he was in the garden, where good things like vegetables and flowers come up out of the dirt.

Father is not resurrected, but he does go on forever, "arriving eternally on the shore of his Self." He is discontent throughout the story, a fact symbolized by his going off on Polar explorations, literally searching the remotest corners of the globe to fulfill some need. The author could squeeze him out of the family with divorce, but he is sent to his reward in the end. As in the case of Morgan, death is presented as a type of fulfillment for those who have outlived their worldly purpose and deserve to go someplace better.

The deaths of Sarah and Coalhouse are not comical or gentle. In some sense, Coalhouse Walker's death could possibly be considered self-willed: not because he created the circumstances surrounding it, which he was only partly responsible for, but because he knows full well that he will be shot. His will is written, and "probably he knew that all he must do in order to end his life was to turn his head abruptly or lower his hands or smile." True to the novel's style, Walker's death is not presented directly, but is relayed from the point of view of non-witnesses: first, apparently, from news accounts, since we are told he "was said by police to have made a dash for freedom," and then from Father, who does not look outside until the shooting is all over. There is a fog of mystery around the specifics of Walker's death, just as there is around the death of Younger Brother. Both of them rise above any horror they go through to become mythical figures.

Sarah's is the only death presented as being truly tragic, painful, and unnecessary. She is not prepared, and is mystified about what happens to her: her death is a result of a misunderstanding touched off by bigotry. The murder of Sarah should have a more chilling impact on the reader, but it doesn't, because Sarah is the most poorly-realized character in the book. In theory, the details about her make for a good and reasonable story: the unwed mother who gives birth in secret and then tries to kill the baby, the jilted woman who resists her returning suitor's courtship, the naive girl who turns to the President to solve her problems. Too many factors have to be ignored, though, to believe what we are told about Sarah. Readers have to not wonder where she comes from. They have to accept the fact that she could live in the house and raise her child without speaking, or that the narrative, which can get into a private meeting between Morgan and Henry Ford, would not know what she says. In the end, her death seems too fantastic, too convenient for the novelist's requirements, yet three shades more brutal than anything else in the world of the book, including the strike-breaking police. "Perhaps in the dark windy evening of the impending storm it seemed to Sherman's guards that Sarah's black hand was a weapon"—even though its first word tries to cloud reality, the statement rings false except on a symbolic level. The horror of her beating and death is weakened by the faint reminder that this is all fiction.

The fact that the deaths in Ragtime are presented in ways that do not shock is, in this case, a good thing: these characters are, for the most part, fulfilled by their deaths. In other cases this could be taken to indicate a world view on the part of the author that is serene, finding everything, even death, to have its place in the grand scheme of things. Doctorow uses a sarcastic tone, though, that implies anything but serenity. The reason the deaths in this book are not shocking is that they seem appropriate, which is a tribute to how well-drawn these characters are. Things here happen when it is their time—even the death of Coalhouse Walker, and even the death of Sarah. Doctorow brings these characters full circle, explaining their lives in ways that make their deaths the logical results. While another book might shy away from death or give death a dark, menacing presence, Ragtime presents it, but in this presentation it does not seem so bad.

Source: David J. Kelly, in an essay for Novels for Students, Gale, 1999.

Perhaps the crucial difference between E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime (1975) and other, more thoroughgoing fictional reinventions of history such as Barth's Giles Goat-Boy (1966) or Rushdie's Shame (1983) is that the latter use history to say something about fiction—they display the endlessly fertile capacity of the novelistic imagination to compensate for the stubborn limitations, or paucity, of facts—while Doctorow uses fiction to say something about history. Specifically, Doctorow calls into question the whole business of historicity and the origination of historical "fact" from possibly doubtful sources. Doctorow's metaphor for history in the novel is a "player piano" that plays its own tune, regardless of the style—classical, romantic, ragtime—which the pianist chooses to interpret it in. History, as the music of what happened, the events that actually took place, is not the same as history as it is received in the present from what historians have written down. Events are not scientifically mappable by "history" any more than, in Doctorow's novel, the North Pole is precisely locatable by the explorers of the Peary expedition or the correct alignment of the chair with the room by Theodore Dreiser. We put our flag or chair down anywhere: we make our own centers. As Doctorow, following Roland Barthes, has said in interview statements, there is no fiction or non-fiction, only narrative: the telling of a story.

Indeed, history, insofar as it is always narrowly partial and selective, is one of the least trustworthy and potentially one of the most fictional of narrative forms. As the opening pages of Ragtime demonstrate, whole racial groups have been written out of American history simply by not being mentioned, and the task of the novelist, as conceived by Doctorow, is to write them back in. The novelist's own pseudo-history parodies and then rewrites the falsely sentimental, nostalgic picture of the American past, as composed from the patriotic viewpoint of the dominant white middle-class culture which prevailed at the turn of the century. Not only are Doctorow's characters historically syncopated, fractionally offbeat on the historical chronometer like the base key which is marginally behind the melody in Scott Joplin's music (his Emma Goldman and Walker gang belong, in fact, to the 1960s), but his entire quasi-history is itself systematically unsynchronized or "in ragged time" with the school textbook, its facts always slightly askew from the received version. Against the known facts, Doctorow syncopates what he regards as "truthful fictions," which are poetically if not historically true: Freud and Jung mischievously shut up together in the Tunnel of Love on Coney Island and, on a more serious note, the Poverty Balls where guests dress in rags and the Stockyard Ball that is set in a mock-slaughterhouse. Concerning the latter two instances, which were certainly in the spirit of the times whether true or not, Doctorow's point is that in the early 1900s American reality was already becoming so incredible that it was most accurately located at the point where history fades into fiction, the factual into the fantastic.

History, Doctorow subsequently implies, is so patently fictional that there is no longer any felt need to preserve in separate categories fictional and historical plots and characters as, for example, Dos Passos had done in his trilogy U.S.A. (1937). Thus, all the canons of historical decorum are violated: personages from the newsreels and history books enter audaciously into the fictional life of the book either by performing fictional acts or meeting fictional characters.

And yet there are still a number of differences between the novel's fictional and historical material which assert themselves in its narrative form and serve to keep the two kinds of material in separate and clearly differentiated categories. Firstly, the historical vignettes of J. P. Morgan, Henry Ford, and Harry Houdini have a tendency to immobilize the narrative by the sheer mass of detailed information, to clutter it with blocks of fact, most notably in long accounts of the objects and properties the characters own. This draws attention obtrusively to the amount of undiluted factuality that has not been fictionalized, i.e., artistically shaped into dramatically interesting narrative material.

Secondly and more importantly, the abrupt shifts in locale in the historical material give the impression of history as a sprawling chaotic mass of unconnected facts. Doctorow's point, of course, is that history is plotless, playing its own heedless, incomprehensible music and plotted quite arbitrarily by the historian. But in practice this means that the novel acquires a sense of direction and causality, and indeed any coherence at all, only from the momentum of the fictional plots (of Tateh and Coalhouse Walker). Only then do we sense the presence of a causally related train of events and of mounting crisis, leading to a climax. The novel's underlying postulate, argues Barbara Foley [in her essay "From U.S.A. to Ragtime," in E. L. Doctorow: Essays and Conversations, edited by Richard Trenner, 1983], is 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." What is implied by Doctorow's choice of form is a rather egotistical and paranoid view of history: that the only coherence history has is to be traced to the writer's superior talents as a storyteller.

Thirdly, there is the matter of characterization. We read of Tateh: "He began to create more and more intricate silhouettes, full-figured with backgrounds… With his scissors he suggested not merely outlines but textures, moods, character, despair." Tateh's brief silhouette-sketches illumine character in the light of background; they reveal personality in terms of the determining, victimizing forces acting upon it, and in this they act as a metaphor for the novelist's own flat, silhouettish, two-dimensional creations—in this case, the types of the Poor Jew and of the entrepreneurial Self-Made Man Tateh turns himself into once he has forsaken his victim-status. Doctorow's figures are essentially passive units impinged upon by social and economic forces, conductors of "the flow of American energy" which Tateh, like other American artists, learns to "point his life along," and the novelist seems to be as much interested in this current of historical energy as in the characters it pulses through. The outcome is that the semifictional cast of Ragtime are at times presented as the puppet-victims of history, jerked around in both comic and tragic ways by overwhelming forces, whether of repressed sexuality or institutionalized racism—Younger Brother by the rampant penis that "whips him about the floor" at the lesbian encounter of Evelyn Nesbitt and Emma Goldman, Coalhouse Walker by the firing squad that jerks his body about the street "in a sequence of attitudes as if it were trying to mop up its own blood."

The aesthetic price paid by Doctorow's historical fiction is that the characters, real or invented, are like historical characters: they are thinly textured creations, seen from the outside, not as intricate, complex individuals. Thus we never know if Younger Brother, in joining the Walker gang, is motivated by a burning passion for justice or simply by thrills and excitement ("I can make bombs"), because we are not admitted to his psychological dilemmas and crises. If we are surprised at the end to find that Walker is really not a revolutionary but just wants his car back, it is because we too have seen him, externally, through the public responses of the media, cinema newsreels, and newspapers features.

It would therefore be fitting that Walker should end his life as a historical character. In fact he does not. His fate is not that of the historical nineteenth-century visionary Hans Kohlhaas, who saw himself as a millenial revolutionary and an avenging agent of the Archangel Michael come to form a new world government. It is, instead, that of the eponymous hero of Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas (1810) about the sixteenth-century horse dealer Michael Kohlhaas (who here becomes "Coalhouse") and his pursuit of justice against the corrupt Junker Wenzel Von Tronka (here, Willie Con-klin) over the wrecking of his horses (here, a car). Kleist's Kohlhaas simply wants his horses back, but he has to murder, rob, and loot in order to get the injustice redressed and the price, as in Coalhouse Walker's case, is his own execution: the shining new horses are paraded past him as he climbs the scaffold. Society finally pays its debt to him, and he to it, for his crimes. Coalhouse Walker, though he appears to be perceived in historical terms, is really a derived fiction, and he ends as one, paralleling the fiction in which he has his origin. He ends as a character in somebody else's book.

Source: Derek Wright, "Ragtime Revisited: History and Fiction in Doctorow's Novel," in International Fiction Review, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1993, pp. 14-16.