Luke's History as Fiction Blog

Ragtime is an amalgamation of various writing methods employed by Doctorow. He utilizes an unusual point of view, mixes both historical and fictional events, uses a nameless family to represent a generic upper class white family, intertwines multiple seemingly unconnected smaller stories, constantly flows from one idea to another, etc. But in particular, Doctorow’s depiction of change throughout the novel stood out to me. In the very first chapter of the book, Doctorow provides an example of a changing America in the lines “Everyone wore white in summer. Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants” and “Her underclothes were white. Her husband habitually whipped her. She happened once to meet Emma Goldman, the revolutionary. Goldman lashed her with her tongue. Apparently there were Negroes. There were immigrants.” The first thing I noticed when reading these sentences was just how Doc...

As I read Ragtime, I constantly have one question lingering in the back of my mind: how much of this is real, and how much of it is fake? It might sound like a silly question at first, and I guess it is, but for some reason my head just can’t stop thinking about it. I think it’s obvious most of the plot points are fabricated, although there are sections in the story which are based on true events. But, how exactly do I draw the line between history and fiction? I remember seeing a study on the correlation between information and entertainment. Viewers first watched a boring documentary-like video, and then they were shown a more fun film that contained similar information as the documentary but with some inaccuracies. Viewers were informed before watching the second video that it may be inaccurate, and that they should take the information presented in the video with a grain of salt. They were then tested based on information present in both videos they watched, and as it turns out, ...