Review Guidelines: Use the Chart for Each Book to Trigger Your Review of and Reflection
Ragtime
Review guidelines: Use the chart for each book to trigger your review of and reflection upon the characters, scenes and themes of the novel.
Remember that as you review Book II, you are attending to narrative perspective (whose thoughts and feelings are revealed); and the method of dialogue—whether it is direct quotations (regardless of the fact that D. does not use quotations marks) or indirect discourse. You want to be thinking about a) why Doctorow would do it that way and b) what effect(s) his decisions have on the text and reader.
Book II
Chapter / Characters; scenes / Notes (optional—do what works for you)Fourteen / Father’s return; Mother’s handling of business
Fifteen / Young boy—“treasured everything discarded”; believed the world composed and recomposed itself;
Narrator comments on “endurance of a duplicated event
Sixteen / Lawrence, MA strike;
Tateh pursues train
Seventeen / Tateh rescued; says “country will not let me breathe”; I.W.W. wins strike—Tateh says, “but what has it won?”
Eighteen / Value of duplicable event;
Ford
Nineteen / J.P. Morgan; reference to Hawthorne’s “Birthmark” (a story we will read shortly); Morgan begins to think about H. Ford
Twenty / Morgan and Ford share a “light lunch”; contrast between the two; thoughts of Ford
Twenty-one / Coalhouse Walker, Jr. introduced; background; first visit to family; plays “Wall Street Rag”; YB only one who knows Ragtime; CW played “The Maple Leaf”—boy perceived it as “light touching various places in space.” Visit impressed everyone except Sarah
Twenty-two / YB trips to NY; reference to Mexican Revolution; follows Goldman; they converse at party; YB hears train as a rag—a suicide rag
Twenty-three / Coalhouse and the Emerald Isle firemen’s “toll”; CW consults family; YB sees vandalized car
Twenty-four / YB feels on the verge of collapse; more background on Coalhouse—saw three different attorneys; could not marry Sarah until he was satisfied with the return of his car
Twenty-five / Sarah developed; decided on action on her own: petition United States; interpreted as attempted assassination; dies toward end of week
Twenty-Six / Funeral in Harlem; band played dirges; cortege moved slowly
Twenty-seven / Spring; death of Houdini’s mother; thought of communicating with her; performances became very intense, often frightening to children; Houdini “buried and reborn” (contrast to “duplicable event” of someone like Ford or Tateh)
Twenty-eight / Blast of Emerald Isle station house; buckshot cause of four deaths—had to have been accomplices. Father reproached Mother for taking in the child in the first place. Coalhouse identifies himself with the crime