The Revolution in the Pace of Life
Scott Joplin, the foremost figure in the history of ragtime music, famously urged musicians to avoid playing rags too fast. Ragtime was the music of black America and it would shortly give way to jazz. And, as everybody knows, when it comes to jazz, some like it hot and fast. Thus the coming revolution in music from the slower pace of ragtime to the faster rhythms of jazz becomes an unspoken but all-encompassing thematic metaphor for the entire novel. A Ford Model T plays a vital role in the plot as well as speaking to the increase in pace of American life that will come with assembly line production. In turn, assembly line production will soon increase the pace of manufacturing and thereby energize the movement of the American economy from a rural one heavily dependent on agriculture to an urban one increasingly dependent on factories. A major plot line follows personalizes the growth of the photography industry from a leisurely one producing a single image at time to a fast-paced one based on stringing thousands of single images together to produce the illusion of movement under the oxymoronic name of motion pictures. All these changes will essentially explode almost simultaneously shortly after the point at which the novel ends, thus bringing the slower pace of the age of ragtime to a close.
The Diversification of American Society
The novel begins with a focus on a tradition WASP family informed by Victorian values that are intended to be so representative of the typical family of the time they are not even given names, but referred to simply as Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother. By the novel’s conclusion, Mother is now married to a Jewish immigrant who has taken the name Baron Ashkenazi and they are parents to an African-American child whom Mother saved from abandonment and eventually adopted to raise on her own. The typical American family has become a mélange of various cultural and ethnic backgrounds, thus mirroring the future of the country far more closely than the recent past.
The Rejection of Progress
The theme of diversification also has a flip side which is revealed through incident and character. Father elects to accompany a famous real-life explorer on a mission to locate the North Pole early on in the story and in his absence, wholesale changes take place for which he is unprepared to deal upon his return. Mother becomes empowered as both a feminist and her Younger Brother gets involved in radical politics. Father never recovers from these changes because of a resistance to accept them. Likewise, the rejection of progress serves as the ignition for the novel’s most incendiary plot line when a cultured black man demonstrating his success and wealth has a showdown with racists who refuse even to accept the possibility of such a radical alternation of their view of traditional roles.
Social Mobility
An underlying yet pervasive theme running through the novel is the opportunity America offers for social mobility. As a figure of middle-class success, Father can take time away from his business to pursue a wild dream on a ship breaking through the ice of the Arctic. Tateh arrives in American by ship with a stop at Ellis Island and when the American Dream is stifled in the slums of New York. Evelyn Nesbit, made famous through the infamy of a violent death showdown between her husband and her lover has her driver take her to see the city and in the process is instrument in Tateh eventually taking a train out of town before ultimately settling in California as part of the founders of Hollywood. Coalhouse Walker enjoys success because of musical talent to the point of buying his own beautiful Model T. That expression of social mobility offered by America comes with the price of those who resent its availability to those not deemed deserving. The novel is packed with every conceivable manner of transportation which become the symbolic technological realization of the economic mobility inspiring their invention.