The Confusing Narrator

Over the course of the book I’ve been thinking about the narration as well as how the “so it goes” plays into the book. We were talking a bit about it in class on Thursday but that discussion just made me a bit more confused. So, this is being narrated by Vonnegut, but it’s the story of Billy. And, we were trying to think about if it made sense that Billy has schizophrenia or PTSD from the war and that’s why the story is laid out the way it is. I feel like that would make sense if Billy was the narrator, but Vonnegut makes himself sort of a fictional character and then narrates, so he wouldn’t have to follow all the time jumps that Billy went through if he didn’t want to. I also wonder how the narrator would have gotten all this knowledge about Billy. It makes sense that he probably heard a lot of it second hand and is just retelling the story. At first, that was one of my initial impressions of the “so it goes”. It just seemed like someone was trying to tell a story as secondary source and they were trying to say that they weren’t the primary source by saying, “at least that’s how I heard it went.” But, the discussion yesterday gave me a new thought that maybe Vonnegut is somehow also with Billy through all of this. It seems like he’s been doing this warping with Billy for a long time and the “so it goes” sorta is just like a “here we go again”. He’s tired and knows how everything is going to go except he doesn’t know about when the time warps are. He seems sorta worn out by reliving all these experiences. I started writing my blog post before my class’ panel presentation that talked a little bit about this and Vonnegut having these time travels and imaging Billy makes sense.Vonnegut doesn’t want to think about the passage of time and death. The panel presentation made a good point that Vonnegut really distances himself from the story of Dresden by making himself a character and then creating Billy and then Billy sorta “creating” tralfamadore.

Jes Grew

I was thinking about all the Jes Grew epidemics throughout the world’s history when I thought about a form of Jes Grew in the 70’s. Disco. The date at the end of the epilogue is right at the emergence of disco, with 1971 being the first time Disco reaches television with Soul Train.

As disco emerged it was met with backlash from rock fans because it didn’t carry the same subject matter that rock did, yet was becoming just as popular. Also, part of that reason was because disco embraced themes that weren’t exclusively white and heterosexual. According to Wikipedia, “[disco’s] initial audiences were club-goers from the gay, African American, Italian American, Latino, and psychedelic communities in Philadelphia and then later New York City during the late 1960s and early 1970s.” Papa Labas is giving his speech in New York around this time, so evidently he must know about the rise of disco in America. Perhaps this particular lecture is focused on because it is the dawn of a new Jes Grew movement and Papa Labas wants to try to educate everyone to know that eventually Jes Grew will win and whatever that particular strain of Jes Grew is will be let into the culture of the atonists. What do you all think?

With disco there was a dancing everywhere, as characteristic of Jes Grew. With television it spread rapidly and by the mid 70’s there were movies coming out that were focused around disco dancing such as Saturday Night Fever -- which you all probably have heard about.

It seems that with disco, it was tolerated and embraced far quicker by the “atonists” than Jes Grew was. Within a few short years it’s transfer onto television makes everyone familiar with it and many people are overtaken by how groovy it is. However, the age of disco is quite short, ending in the early 1980’s. Its ending is very abrupt, just like Jes Grew in the book.

Those are some parallels that I saw, do you all see anything else?

Little Boy Narrator in Ragtime

When I was researching for my panel presentation the article I was using stated, “The memory of the young boy, the principal narrator, reaches backward to 1902, when the house in New Rochelle was built, and forward to the marriage of Tateh and Mother in 1917 “ (Ostendorf 579).

While I was reading ragtime, I never thought that the Little Boy could be the narrator. However, now that I think about it, I think it could fit. That makes sense why the mother and father of the family are called Mother and Father throughout the book.  It also makes sense why the information on Coalhouse came from other sources and the narration didn’t get in his mind. He’s not directly connected to the little boy, so everything he can gather either must have come from his father, uncle, or newspapers. Having access to Mother’s Younger Brother’s diary also seems more probable. For people not close to him and not seeming to have any major contact with any of the family members (such as Ford, Morgan, or Houdini) I’m not sure how the little boy would get that information. He does seem to have supernatural powers (like making Houdini’s car stop in front of his house and predicting his father would take him to the baseball game) but there is still a lot of information the little boy would have to read out of Morgan or Ford’s mind. And, if he could read their mind, why wouldn’t he read Coalhouse’s? Perhaps the narrator changes at certain points?

I sifted through google to see if Doctorow confirmed that the little boy was the narrator at any point, and I found the answer in an interview of Doctorow done by Michael Wutz in 1994.

Doctorow: The hidden narrator of Ragtime is probably the little boy in later times

Wutz: Excuse me for interrupting here. Why do you say "probably"? Of late, that's a question that has received quite some attention within the critical community-whether or not the little boy is, indeed, the narrator.

Doctorow: Because he was hidden to me for so much of that book. At a certain point quite near the end he betrays a personal relationship to everything he has narrated and appears to be the son of Mother and Father, namely the little boy. I'm pretty sure that's who it is, but I'm not sure that that is essential for reading the book to know that.

Even Doctorow isn’t totally positive about the little boy being the narrator. I guess it’s even still open to interpretation. What do you all think?

For more of the interview:

https://weberstudies.weber.edu/archive/archive%20B%20Vol.%2011-16.1/Vol.%2011.1/11.1Wutz.htm

Ragtime's Plot

In class the other day we talked a little about how the plot starts halfway through the book. I was thinking about it a bit, and it makes sense to me why the book was laid out in this way. We get a chance to see all the characters’ backgrounds and how each person functions independently. All this background is the basis for which all the plot is set upon so that Doctorow doesn’t have to spend the type trying to develop each character and taking away from the huge plot that he’s trying to present.

There was a lot of talk though the first few days of reading this book about how Doctorow’s irony and sarcasm was more prevalent in the first half and then gets more serious as the main plot starts unfolding. Since most of the background chapters on the characters are small tidbits of “normal” life, irony makes them a lot more fun to read while still getting across the information. It also helps make sure that we’re thinking about the characters and developing opinions about them so that when the plot starts, we already know everything we need to know about the character’s motives.  Once the plot starts with regular characters appearing and building on happenings, the story is interesting enough without tons of irony added in. Perhaps Doctorow thought that making the main plot ironic would be overkill. With such drastic change from lots of irony to minimal irony, he’s letting us see that he’s serious and that the content is very serious at this point, making us focus more.

Do you have any thoughts on why Doctorow decided to make the layout of the book this way? Do you think the book would have a different feeling if the layout was different (with the background inside the plot, no background, etc.)?