Ragtime

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1975

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-7

Part 1, Chapters 8-13

Part 2, Chapters 14-21

Part 2, Chapters 22-28

Part 3, Chapters 29-34

Part 3, Chapters 35-39

Part 4

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Part 4Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 4, Chapter 40 Summary

Coalhouse Walker exits the Morgan library. Militiamen immediately shoot him to death. Later police reports say that Coalhouse tried to flee, although there are no witnesses to corroborate these claims.

After the incident, Coalhouse Walker’s followers are disillusioned. Mother’s Younger Brother takes the discarded Model T and drives freely with no destination. He goes all the way to Mexico and joins the Mexican Revolution. He fights and builds bombs for the revolutionaries, eventually going deaf from his work with weapons. Mother’s Younger Brother dies in Mexico, under unknown circumstances.

Pierpont Morgan travels the world. He notices a remarkable decline in the power and intelligence of royal families, emperors, and kings. He travels to Egypt, visits the Great Pyramid, and insists on sleeping in it overnight. He believes he will communicate with the god Osiris, but only finds himself swarmed by bedbugs. Morgan returns to Europe and is never the same again, disillusioned and in poor health. Soon after Morgan dies, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife are assassinated in Sarajevo. Harry Houdini reads the headlines and is stunned. Houdini does a spectacular stunt over Broadway in Manhattan, but all he can think about is the murdered Archduke.

Mother, the boy, and Coalhouse’s son—now named Coalhouse Walker III—drive to Maine for summer vacation. Father and Mother are now separated, the death of Mother’s Younger Brother having provided the final nail in their marriage’s coffin. In 1915, during the First World War, Father dies aboard the Lusitania, a ship carrying American passengers torpedoed by a German U-Boat. A year later, Tateh proposes to Mother, who “accepted him without hesitation” (319). They move to California. Emma Goldman is deported from the United States for radical activity. Evelyn Nesbit, no longer young and marketable as a model, fades into obscurity. After his release from the insane asylum, Harry K. Thaw marches every year in the Newport, Rhode Island Armistice Day parade.

Part 4, Chapter 40 Analysis

Part 4 is mostly concerned with exploring the characters’ mental and emotional states. While the rest of the novel leads up to the beginning of the World War I, Chapter 40 witnesses the war’s outbreak and moves through to its conclusion. In Ragtime, the First World War is a constant shadow looming over the novel’s unsuspecting characters. It represents the drastic changes to come for the United States. Chapter 40 explores which of Ragtime’s characters have successfully adapted to the radical changes witnessed by early 20th-century America and who is left behind in the war’s wake, incapable of adjusting to the 1920s.

Just as in the rest of his novel, Doctorow weaves true events into his fictional narrative. Mother’s Younger Brother, for instance, is a fictional character placed within the true events of the Mexican Revolution. The narrative uses Harry Houdini’s connection to Archduke Franz Ferdinand to meditate on the outbreak of the World War I. Father is drawn into one of the key episodes of the war itself: the sinking of the Lusitania, which is often named as one of the major reasons that the United States entered the war.

Doctorow uses these historical episodes as landmarks to track not merely the passage of time, but the evolution—or stagnation—of characters’ mental and emotional states. Houdini, for instance, is incapable of grappling with the death of the Archduke; Father, too, witnesses his own emotional stagnation after the murder of Coalhouse and his divorce from Mother. Father’s death on the Lusitania represents the death of his era, the 19th century, in the face of the First World War and the permanent political, social, and economic changes it brings. Father’s inability to embrace progression is his demise. Similarly, Pierpont Morgan is let down by his travels abroad to Egypt, where he witnesses both the panicked implosion of the world’s royal families and an utterly underwhelming trip to the Great Pyramids. Just like Father, Morgan dies soon after this trip precisely because his era has ended.

Mother, meanwhile, represents an emotional flexibility and capability for progression that many of the male characters lack. She leaves Father—the stagnant character representing America’s retrograde values—behind for Tateh, an immigrant who embodies ingenuity and progression. The final chapter is thus dedicated to showing who is capable of surviving in the new, postwar America—and who cannot.