Out of Time, Out of Place, Out of Mind
Ragtime is a novel about those transitional moments in history when things change and when things change, by definition some of things get left behind because they are no longer useful. Father and J.P. Morgan are the two figures who most clearly belong to the world before the events of the novel more than they belong to the world after. Father almost immediately sets off for the frozen tundra of the Arctic and spends the rest of the narrative acting like an Ice Age relic accidentally thawed into a world he doesn’t even recognize. By the end of the novel, the Gilded Age robber baron who no longer belongs to the Fordist economic model—J.P. Morgan—has also been situated as a relic of the past as he tries to escape the indignity of finding only bedbugs in an ancient pyramid he thought held the secrets to his immortality.
Historical Fiction
The pre-dominant use of imagery in the novel is the collision between purely fictional creations and historical figures. In some cases, the historical figures are famous enough to be recognizable to most readers. Where character transforms into imagery is at those junctures where the less famous seem engage in acts that seem made up and where fictional characters engage in acts that seem real. For instance, Evelyn Nesbit was a name and face as famous as any in American for a brief period, by the novel’s publication in 1970’s was a mere footnote whose road to fame—a love triangle involving scandalous sex and murder of respected New York businessman—seems made up. On the other hand, Coalhouse Walker’s occupying the J.P. Morgan library in response to horrific displays of racism seems like something that could have happened even the name Coalhouse Walker isn’t one of the famous names in the book.
Positioning
A brief but thematically relevant scene describes the attempt by novelist Theodore Dreiser to perfectly position his chair within a spare room as a means of attaining perfect alignment in order to begin writing after disappointing reaction to his latest novel. Robert Peary’s attempt to pinpoint the exact geographic position of the North Poles meets with frustration. J.P. Morgan spends the night in an Egyptian pyramid unable to sleep because of bedbugs and forcing himself to pace from east to west and north to south despite being thoroughly incapable of determining direction from his position deep inside the structure. Various other character play out more figurative attempts to position themselves correctly only to face repeated frustration before figuring out where they should stand in relation to where they do stand.
Death
Many characters die in Ragtime; some literally and others figuratively. Regardless of the literal quality of death, however, the demise is usually anticlimactic and fails to carry over into the rest of the narrative as having explicit impact. Both Harry K. Thaw and Stanford White die as a result of loving Evelyn Nesbit—one literally and the other figuratively by being judged insane and sentenced to an asylum—but Nesbit seems only to be affected economically by these losses. By the time Father dies aboard the ill-fated Lusitania he has already seemed to be dead for years. Tateh dies when he reinvents himself as Baron Ashkenazy and the loss of a firebrand socialist trading in the life for an avowed capitalist barely registers. The only death that seems to really strike a nerve and impact the future is that one Coalhouse Walker to take over Morgan’s library, but even that action seems related more to the idea of getting his beloved car back. And, finally, Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination goes noticed only by Houdini. In this case, the novel is truthful as most Americans had little idea that the murder of an obscure European duke would set off a worldwide war. And that lack of recognition of the consequences of death seems to the purpose of this imagery that underscores a recurring theme.
