Ragtime
Thursday, November 29
E.L. Doctorow's dazzling novel, Ragtime, was made into a Broadway musical by Garth Drabinsky and Terrence McNally. Currently, there are a book, a DVD, and audio cassettes available.
The novel, Ragtime, was about ordinary people like you and me who got caught in the currents of time.
Doctorow wrote the novel in the early 1970s and did not witness the Ragtime era. Nonetheless, he choses a history-based approach when he portrays a major turning point in America's history.
Ragtime includes three stories which surround three families from three entirely different backgrounds:
- The established, upper-class WASP family
- The Jewish immigrant family
- The Afro-American family
This apporach makes use of tipicality which is an often observed method used in literature.
E.L. Doctorow discovers, by means of attention to the historical period, the way those three families‘ lives intersected both with one another and with the events and currents of the time.
He sets the story spinning when Doctorow uses real-life lengends, such as Henry Ford, Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbin, or Stanford White, as metaphors and emblems for the currents of the time.
A truly beautiful novel.
