Ragtime and America

          I was very excited to read the first fiction book we have in Amcon, until I realized the some of the familiar characters. I found it fascinating how Doctorow ties different characters intertwined with each other and the line between fiction and facts blurs within the story telling. The beginning of the new century was the beginning of technology and industries, when the Wright brothers made their first fly and Ford's cars driven in people's home. In Takaki's history book I didn't find anything particular about history in the 1900s but Takaki has a significant amount of descriptions and history about immigrants in his book. In the first part of Ragtime, Doctorow writes about immigrants too. In chapter 2, “Father, a normally resolute person, suddenly foundered in his soul. A weird despair seized over him" (13) when he saw the immigrants on the deck. The New Yorkers despised immigrants, yet ironically they were all immigrants or decedents of immigrants to this country. Takaki talks about the Irish, Chinese, Japanese in California, who had the same life and poverty as those in New York. I like how Doctorow jumps around in stories and characters but somehow they are related. Father saw the immigrants, the poor, and Teteh and the little girl connect to Evelyn, and then to Thaw. In the prison Houdini encountered Thaw. And Houdini's car crashed into the family. Everything and everyone is connected in this world, through events, people, and coincidence. Everything all together makes up the country. These are all pieces of the United States: we have the poor, the affluent, different classes of people, and different ideas. These all consist the beginning of the 20th century America. However, "The entire population seemed to him over-power, brash and rude"(39), as Fraud states, and "America is a mistake, a gigantic mistake"(39). I think advance technology and capitalist economy make our lives easier, but they also generates problems for the lower class. The poor were poorer, but paradoxically, people still "honor" the poor by decorating the ball room. Charity, they called it.