Ragtime's Ending Kind of Sucked?
E.L. Doctorow definitely has a style of writing and storytelling that, while not necessarily usual, seems to stay pretty consistent throughout Ragtime. So when I read the last chapter of his book, it was surprising how contrasting it was to the way the story had been told in the rest of the book.
Despite its oddities, for most of Ragtime Doctorow maintains a pretty slow pace. He likes to spend a lot of time on one thing, and sometimes it could feel, at least to me, like not much was going on plotwise at many points in the book. A lot of time is spent developing the characters while less is spent on specific events. The last chapter, however, behaves completely differently.
In just a few pages, more major plot points play out than in almost all of the book combined, however they are given much less attention and gravity. Almost all the prominent male characters of Ragtime die off, leaving Tateh, Mother, the two children and not much else. It definitely seemed like an odd move to me, and I'm still not quite sure why Doctorow decided he had to bring down all these characters crashing down with the novel.
It honestly kind of just feels like a cop-out to me where he couldn't or didn't want to figure out what to do with the characters next and how to end their stories so he just took the easy road and killed them. I defnitely could be wrong on this, but it was a bit strange to me. I guess one explanation that fits with Doctorow's style and personality is he was once again just showing us that he has control. He can do whatever he wants in his book no matter how ridiculous, so the abrupt and chaotic ending of the novel was just one final display of his power.
I don't really have an answer for why he ended the book in such a way, or what the deeper meaning of it is, but here's my beginings of thoughts on the topic. I'd definitely be interested to know what other people thought about the ending.
Yeah, most of the men in the story do get killed off! However, I have a theory for why Father and Mother's Younger Brother were killed in particular. For Father, it could be because he was too stuck in the old century – he was never really accepting of change, whereas Mother easily adapted to the time period. On the other hand, Mother's Younger Brother is too futuristic – his ideas of equality and his love for activism fit in better with the 1960s than the 1910s. However, you explanation that Doctorow just wants to flex how much power he has also seems like a reasonable explanation for all the deaths.
ReplyDeleteA lot about the conclusion did seem much less deliberate than the rest of the book. With any other author, I might just think they got lazy, but this is Doctorow! His attention to detail is unparalleled. I interpreted killing off father, grandfather, and mother's younger brother as ushering the end of an "era" (mother, father, and little boy's time together as a family) as the end of the ragtime era came about.
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