Shattered Families In Ragtime Research Paper

The piece displays a great message that resonates with many of the problems society still faces in today day and age. The play Ragtime is set in New York City in the early 20th century. The Socioeconomic issues that plagued

The narrator was writhing in the misery of the burden of brotherly love. The narrator’s mother, via tasking him with looking after Sonny, asked him to serve as his sibling’s keeper and protector. The narrator was riddled with grief throughout his life right from the burden of brotherly love that was placed upon his shoulder, to the dilapidated living conditions he and Sonny had to endure while shaking up in the projects, to the imprisonment of his younger brother and the death of his own daughter-

E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime is a work of historical fiction that uniquely allows both fictional and historical characters to take part in events that depict life in early 20th-century America. Various historical figures are interconnected to one another and described throughout the text including Emma Goldman, Robert Peary, Matthew Henson, Harry Kendall Thaw, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, and Harry Houdini.

The book Native son is based in the 1930s about a black man named Bigger Thomas and his troubles as a black person in this bad time of segregation and oppression. In this debate we discussed about the murder of Mr.Dalton’s daughter and if Bigger or society were the ones at fault for her death. This debate is important because it touches on the subject of segregation and fear upon another minority race but also on the ongoing story of Native Son. My group was against society and we believed that Bigger was truly the one at fault because of these points. Bigger Thomas knew the consequences of being in a white girl’s room but still continued to carry Mary to her room which eventually led to her death. When Mrs.Dalton had came into the room Bigger had the power to choose his actions but he thought it was necessary to smother Mary to death. Her death was not due to society or how grew up thinking; it was his choice to kill her in the end with his own hands. He took pleasure in the excitement; not the other way around.

(282) When Coalhouse expresses, “both be servants of our color who insist on the truth of our manhood and the respect it demands,” Coalhouse talks to Booker T Washington and tries to show him from his sharp words that by just standing and hoping for manhood, our people won’t achieve their rights, but by fighting and rebelling, we demand America to redefine equality. Coalhouse is deeply sliced by the death of Sarah, and his decision for demanding equality is on the verge to his death. He questions the fact that to save a car, Sarah sacrificed herself. He is growling inside to know, why black are faced with

Ragtime is a musical about three families from three different backgrounds and their stories that intersect in some areas. One family is white, one is black, and one is jewish. Around that time, the white were disgusted by the music the blacks were playing called Ragtime. The jews at this time were immigrants, and people didn’t like them along with other immigrants because there weren’t a lot of jobs at that time. This was time in america where racism was prevalent.

Many tragic events happen in this short story that allows the reader to create an assumption for an underlying theme of racism. John Baldwin has a way of telling the story of Sonny’s drug problem as a tragic reality of the African American experience. The reader has to depict textual evidence to prove how the lifestyle and Harlem has affected almost everything. The narrator describes Harlem as “... some place I didn’t want to go. I certainly didn’t want to know how it felt. It filled everything, the people, the houses, the music, the dark, quicksilver barmaid, with menace; and this menace was their reality” (Baldwin 60). Another key part in this story is when the narrator and Sonny’s mother is telling the story of a deceased uncle. The mother explains how dad’s brother was drunk crossing the road and got hit by a car full of drunk white men. Baldwin specifically puts emphasis on the word “white” to describe the men for a comparison to the culture of dad and his brother.

The renowned image of the Ragtime era is principally based on the exclusion of large portions of reality. This idea is explained in Jesus Benito Sanchez’s “A Breach in the Frame of History”, an article strongly focused on the relationship between fiction and history in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime. Sanchez expands on different examples of popular culture of the Ragtime era that frequently recurs in the novel, and how they produce a misrepresentation of the past. The misrepresentation of the Ragtime era shown in Doctorow’s Ragtime is supported by false images of popular culture including photographs, Tateh’s silhouettes and films- which come together to reach the novel’s goal- to unmask the fictional construction of the past.

“One day there was a blowout so explosive that it sucked four workmen out of the tunnel and blew them through twenty feet of river silt and shot them up threw the river itself forty feet into the air on the crest of a geyser. Only one of the men survived. (13.1)” America had embedded industrialization so deeply at the core of the 1900’s that even though men, women, and children were all dying from the deplorable conditions and experiences it was considered a time of excellence. However this excellence came not only off the back of immigrants, but from a systematic oppression of thousands, including black Americans. Sarah and Coalhouse both suffer the injustices from white men and the mistreatment of those considered to be “less than”. Injustice is a main theme of this book, and nearly every character dies as a cause of it, “A militiaman stepped forward and, with the deadly officiousness of armed men who protect the famous, brought the butt of of his Springfield against Sarah's chest as hard as he

One cannot run from hardships, for they occur every day, appear suddenly, and can quickly consume hope. Instead one must face these difficulties and overcome them. However, to rise above obstacles alone would only cause further misery and despair. The struggler’s family should rally behind him to comfort and assist him in his time of need. In Cry, the Beloved Country, a 1948 contemporary novel, Alan Paton uses parallelism to emphasize the importance of family because when individuals encounter hardships they need support from others to help them.

The characters in both Catcher in the Rye and Black Boy experienced myriad challenges that have led to their triumph or despair. Each character accounts their obstacles from different places in their lives. Richards Wright’s autobiography allows for the reader to grasp an understanding of the hardships African Americans faced in the south due to Jim Crow Laws. A vivid memory of Richards’s childhood was coming home to dinner later to know his Uncle Hoskins was lynched by local whites who were jealous of his profitable saloon. When Richard begins to ask questions regarding white supremacy in the south he is often shunned and ignored.

Coalhouse Walker was nothing but respectful towards the volunteer firemen who in return treated him with no respect whatsoever. Had Coalhouse Walker been white, the firemen would not have given him a hard time regarding the road. The Chief insisted that Coalhouse Walker would have to pay in order to drive through a road he had passed through several times. Frustrated, Walker asked some young boys to watch over his car while he went to the police department. When Coalhouse Walker returned, his car had been vandalized.

Ragtime is full with a myriad number of characters, from Harry Houdini to Booker T Washington, but the pivotal characters in my eyes were Mother and Father. There’s something to be said when the main characters of a novel don’t even have names, unlike the many other minor characters, who were major players in history. What makes them stand out even more is the fact that Mother and Father weren’t the only fictional characters, however, they as long as all of the members of their family, including Little Girl who would join Mother’s family at the end of the tale, were the only ones who were not named. That’s because it’s an obvious way for Doctorow to use them as a symbol for the typical middle-class American family during the Progressive Era. However, this is not the only role they had. In addition, the death of the Frontier and the birth of the Progressive Era is shown in Ragtime through the developing relationship between Father and Mother who represent the Frontier and Progressive Era respectively.

When analyzing Bigger Thomas, Richard Wright’s protagonist in the novel Native Son, one must take into consideration the development of his characterization. Being a poor twenty-year-old Black man in the south side of Chicago living with his family in a cramped one- bedroom apartment in the 1930’s, the odds of him prospering in life were not in his favor. Filled with oppression, violence, and tragedy, Bigger Thomas’ life was doomed from the moment he was born. Through the novel, Bigger divulges his own dreams to provide for his family and to be anything but a “nobody.” Although Bigger struggled to fight through obstacles to pursue his dreams for the future, his chase for a better life came to an abrupt

The ‘Ragtime’ is an illustration of the various relationships that influence people as well as the stark differences that occur between them. Doctorow’s main argument boarders on social issues and struggles which are gender, racial tension and family discords as well as class and the issues that transverse across all classes in the society. For example, J.P. Morgan is illustrated as a sophisticated, high-class person who cannot be equated to the low in society. On the other hand, the struggles of Mother and Father depict the struggles in the other divide. There are also other human differences such as race and gender roles that also come out clearly.