Ironic Confusion
In the brilliantly constructed paragraph that provides a quick outline of an overview of the era that is about to unfold, the author mingles absolute literal sincerity with more ambiguously literal sincerity and adds a dollop of bitterly truthful irony. Often one follows hard upon the other, creating the dizzy sensation of sometimes reading the irony as sincerity:
“Tennis racquets were hefty and the racquet faces elliptical. There was a lot of sexual fainting. There were no Negroes. There were no immigrants.”
Houdini! Peary.
Houdini. The world’s most famous magician and escape artist who died on stage trapped inside a glass box filled with water while hanging upside down (except that Houdini died far away from the stage and the water escape had nothing to do with how or why Houdini died). Peary. That name ring a bell? If not, then the example of irony below which occurs while Houdini is bemoaning his status in the world will be much clearer:
“For all his achievement he was a trickster, an illusionist, a mere magician. What was the sense of his life if people walked out of the theatre and forgot him? The headlines on the newsstand said Peary had reached the Pole. The real-world act was what got into the history books.”
All in the (WASP) Family
Everybody else is given names. The famous figures, obviously, but also the fictional creations. (Tateh actually gets two different names.) But the white Protestant family that holds the center together? They are known only by their relationship to each other: Father, Mother, Mother’s Young Brother, etc. The irony is that though this family is the center of the narrative touching in one way or another all the other characters, including the family, they have no real identity themselves. They are the Family. The WASP family that represents the Americans who hold the country together: nobody special, but taken together a powerful energy of collective force.
The Rise of Baron Ashkenazy
Ragtime is really a story of failure and disappointment and unmet expectations. Nearly every character winds up in a worse position (or just plain dead) than he or she was in at the beginning. This includes the super-rich like J.P. Morgan as well as the oppressed like Coalhouse Walker. Thus there is a certain irony in the fact that the one character whose life is not only better by the end, but better beyond all dreams, is Tateh, the poor Jewish immigrant struggling to raised a daughter and working on the streets.
Where is the Ragtime in Ragtime?
One of the most ironic things about the novel is that for story with the title Ragtime there is actually precious little mention of ragtime music to be found within. This is offset, of course, by the fact that the novel itself is structured and composed using the syncopation and rhythms of rags to produce its overall effect.
