A Happy Ending?

Near the very end of Ragtime, as chapter 40 and the novel itself is winding down, Doctorow indulges in one final metafictional joke: “By that time the era of Ragtime had run out, with the heavy breath of the machine, as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano” (319). The author seems resist the idea that we’ve gotten anywhere over the course of the novel, or that the “history” he’s narrated has been brought to any kind of meaningful or illuminating conclusion. (And if you didn’t notice, the “meta” joke here has to do with the capitalization of “Ragtime”—earlier, when referring to the genre of music, it’s appropriately lowercased, so here it refers simultaneously to the era that is named for the music as well as the novel Ragtime itself, the “era” or historical setting of which has now, in its final paragraph, “run out.” Get it?) We are left with a final image of mad Harry K. Thaw, now officially declared “sane,” marching patriotically in the annual Armistice Day parade. This seems of a piece with the generally cynical or ironic tone of the novel—history does not produce tidy narratives with clear morals or meanings; there is no “point” to be drawn from this story; the lunatic is also the patriot. Time keeps rolling on, and a new era of conflict, strife, confusion, and dark comedy is about to begin. And another. And another.

The primary fictional men in the novel have all died violent deaths in the name of their “causes”—Younger Brother under uncertain circumstances “in a skirmish with government troops” as a zapatista in the Mexican Revolution (305-6); Father as an arms dealer surreptitiously transporting war materiel on the Lusitania, the explosion and sinking of which is allegedly exacerbated by the shipments of “grenades, depth charges and puttied nitro” he is smuggling to Europe on board the purportedly neutral vessel (318); and Coalhouse Walker before a “coordinated volley of a firing squad” courtesy of the NYPD (301). There’s a prevailing sense of futility to these deaths, anonymous and lonely amid the larger flow of history as portrayed in chapter 40. The narrative “camera” pulls back, and in the larger scope of historical narrative these individual stories seem to make not a ripple. It’s sobering, after our deep engagement with the Coalhouse drama, that the only reference to him in the concluding montage is via J. P. Morgan traveling blithely through Europe, “the incident of the mad black man in his Library quite forgotten” (306). The central dramatic narrative of the novel seems to have had no appreciable impact on history—just one more “crime of the century” to be displaced by the next sensational story, erased from the collective memory. And again, this seems in keeping with the tone of ironic detachment we’ve observed in Doctorow’s narrator from the start of the novel. In conventional terms, it’s not a very satisfying ending, just as historical narrative itself may not be satisfying in the way that narrative fiction (traditionally) is.

Likewise, at first glance, the “period of dissolution” (316) that afflicts the Family seems a bleak and depressing development: Doctorow opens the novel with an ironically nostalgic portrait of a respectable middle-class family in New Rochelle, and proceeds to demolish that picture over the course of his narrative. But I would argue that in the conclusion of Mother’s story we have a rare bright spot, maybe even a glimpse of some kind of optimism for the future (which would seem rather uncharacteristic of Doctorow, if the preceding 300 pages have taught us anything). After the conventional period of mourning in the wake of Father’s death, Tateh proposes marriage, and Mother accepts with enthusiasm. Her relationship with Father has been deteriorating (“dissolving”) from the start of the novel, and toward the end they are only “on the most correct and abbreviated speaking terms, the death of Younger Brother in Mexico having provided the final impetus for their almost continuous separation” (317). Her dissatisfaction seems clearly linked to the development of her own independent consciousness (she’s been reading Emma Goldman) and consequent sexual frustration, and Father is increasingly bewildered and put off by her assertiveness, her failure to defer to his traditional role as head of the household. In contrast, we are told, “She adored [Tateh], she loved to be with him. They each relished the traits of character of the other” (319).

We see a more egalitarian or mutual model of a romantic relationship, and it’s a significantly multicultural model as well (with the Yiddish term “Tateh” replacing the WASPish “Father”). While Father is killed, significantly, at the very dawn of modernity (which many scholars identify with the First World War)—“his final exploration” (318), as if his nineteenth-century model can’t survive into the new era—Mother, in contrast, seems to flourish in modernity, as she and Tateh abandon the “Old World” of the East Coast for that quintessentially modern locale, California (likely Los Angeles/Hollywood, since Tateh is in the emergent and quintessentially modern film industry): “They lived in a large white stucco house with arched windows and an orange tile roof. There were palm trees along the sidewalk and beds of bright red flowers in the front yard” (319). Their family reflects a kind of nontraditional, patchwork, multicultural ideal, and in this vision of the future (which children typically represent, according to Whitney Houston) we are offered a possibly hopeful view. It’s inspirational for Tateh, at least: “One morning Tateh looked out the window of his study and saw the three children on the lawn. . . . They were talking and sunning themselves. His daughter, with dark hair, his tow-headed stepson and his legal responsibility, the schwartze child. He suddenly had an idea for a film. A bunch of children who were pals, white black, fat thin, rich poor, all kinds, mischievous little urchins who would have funny adventures in their own neighborhood, a society of ragamuffins, like all of us, a gang, getting into trouble and getting out again” (319). The fictional Tateh is posited here as the creator of the historically “real” Our Gang/Little Rascals series (with apologies to Hal Roach), which was revolutionary in its time for portraying black and white characters as equals, peers, compatriots, brothers in mischief, puncturing the pomposity of the wealthy and privileged at every opportunity. The phrase “like all of us” is telling—there’s a real democracy implied in this vision, not the superficial stuff of flags and bunting and fireworks (associated with Father). There is no hierarchy implied in this family portrait. And thus the three strands of the narrative come together—the WASP child in the sailor blouse, the dark-haired Jewish immigrant girl, and the Black orphan—and in this we might be tempted to see a hopeful vision for a more inclusive future.

Even with Emma Goldman deported from our shores and a violent century of racial and ethnic strife yet to unfold.