Father dies, Coalhouse Walker dies, Young Brother dies. Emma Goldman is deported. Mother and Baron Ashkenazy get married and move to California. And a bunch of other stuff happens. Yay! The End.
For a book that spent the first 300 pages inventing all these fictional but totally historical characters as well as historical but definitely fictional characters and making them run into each other and say and do lots of Crazy Sh*t, the ending just felt way too abrupt and almost lacking on Doctorow's part. Granted, he might be trying to make a point about the flow of history at the end and I wouldn't know since I don't really get what he's doing for most of the book anyways, it just felt like all of this interesting build up was for nothing and Doctorow got bored of writing and so he killed half his characters and made the rest of them get out of New York. I get that this isn't just a work of fiction and that he's also trying to depict how history plays out through his novel but it just felt way too abrupt and out of place considering how the first 39 or so chapters were written. The writing style was fine, just felt very out of place and gave an abrupt ending to such a massive buildup.
As a chapter by itself though, I think that Doctorow's depiction of how history and time move on is really interesting, especially since he wrote this book about the early 1900s in the late 1900s and we're reading it in the 21st century. In the moment, like for people living during the 1910s, the sinking of the Lusitania or the assassination of the Archduke and his wife may not have felt like it was the end of one era and everything that was "in" yesterday has to go today. Doctorow talks about how the era of Ragtime, presumably referencing not just the historical period of Ragtime but also his conveniently titled book Ragtime, had run out (336). While I don't really like this interpretation of history as something that can be cleanly divided into eras and that one day, the present era just ends and a new one begins and it's all good (since everyone from the past either dies or moves away!), I do think it reflects the fact that upcoming and developing conflicts do have an impact in making the events of the past seem almost "small" - the looming war in Europe obviously makes Father and the Peary Expedition's quest to locate the North Pole seem almost lofty. So while this chapter felt extremely awkward when put at the end of so much buildup, I do get many of the points Doctorow's trying to make about the flow and significance of history. Or maybe not.
I completely agree with you about the ending's unsatisfying and almost counterproductive nature. I particularly like what you said about the blur of history and the idea of an era having "run out" as being not representative of the historical nuances Doctorow is attempting to convey during the entire rest of the book. Someone else said it felt like he was trying to meet a deadline and procrastinating a little bit so he had to wrap everything up very quickly in order to meet it. I would say that's a pretty fair assessment. Great work!
ReplyDeleteI know I suggested this same idea in class and on my blog, but the one exception to the bleak ending would be the reconstituted, multicultural West Coast family that emerges from the carnage in chapter 40. It's possible to read this storyline of the two families merging as itself an optimistic take on a quintessential "American Dream" narrative, with Tateh as the inventive self-made immigrant who has renamed himself and projected/constructed a new identity for himself in America. He is poised to enter the film industry at the start, which will be the dominant cultural force for much of the 20th century, and he's poised to start telling fictional stories about a multicultural group of children who assert a new model of diversity into the cultural conversation (in this way, using fiction to influence history?). It is a brief footnote-style summary at the very end of the chapter, in keeping with the "sped up" pace of this last chapter, but the family's story does leave us with some hope and positivity (to contrast poor Houdini, who is literally "left hanging" by the author, cursed out by a random New Yorker as he swings upside-down from a crane over 42nd St.).
ReplyDeleteI really like this assessment of the ending. I think that it is very fair to say that the ending was super unsatisfying and seemed quite rushed. However, you also dived into the reasons why he might've written it like this. However, I think that maybe Doctorow didn't get bored, maybe he just felt like it wasn't his space to continue the stories of the characters beyond the Ragtime era as that's what the book covers. Good job!
ReplyDeleteI definitely get what you mean when you say that the ending was rushed. I know killing off a bunch of the characters is more or less how I used to deal with fictional essays I didn't know how to end in middle school...
ReplyDeleteAnyways, I liked the way you mentioned how Doctorow seems to portray a clear, distinct shift in time period with the ending -- rushing the ending makes it feel like there was a sudden change. Of course, this is not always true, as there is always a blurred line between eras rather than a clear distinction. The rushed ending may have been an attempt at symbolizing the change in eras on Doctorow's part. Great blog post!
I think that many would agree with your opinions on the ending (including me, I wrote somewhere else that it sounds like Doctorow just got burnt out and didn't want to write anymore), but I feel like with so many characters and so many storylines, you can't really mold them all into one happy ending. So it makes sense to me (to some extent) why he'd end it like that. I also don't really know why he had to end it at the end of the Ragtime era.
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