Motion Pictures
The plot threat of Tateh the immigrant street artist reinventing himself to become wealthy and famous in the burgeoning new business of cinema transforms filmmaking into a metaphor for the ability to manipulate static images into the illusion of movement and action. As metaphor this applies to not just images flickering on screen, but personal image. By the end of the story, the poorest major character has reinvented himself as Baron Ashkenazy.
“the white excrescence known as Willie Conklin”
In a letter written by Coalhouse Walker that is published in the newspaper, he lists his demands for which he is willing to give up occupation of the J.P. Morgan library. This particular metaphor accurately describes the human abnormality that is Willie Conklin while also debunking myths about the inferiority of the black man.
Houdini's Straitjacket Escape
Houdini is strapped tightly into a straitjacket, elevated high above the city and upside down. From this perspective, everything is familiar yet unfamiliar; the world is the same but upside-down and so the perspective is all the more unsettling. The crowd watching is trapped midway between the tension of expecting him to escape and wondering if maybe this is one time something goes wrong and doesn’t escape. The entire set piece becomes a metaphor of America at this crucial moment in history. Very shortly the world is going to look topsy-turvy with the outbreak of World War I and Americans will look at their position relative to that world in terms of escaping from the confines of a straitjacket.
The Arctic
When Father makes his decision to follow Peary on his effort to reach the North Pole, it marks the beginning of everything change for him. Making his way back home eventually means discovering Younger Brother’s radicalism, Mother’s feminism and the introduction of race into his life as an actual issue that affects him. The Arctic thus serves a metaphor for an American lifestyle that has been frozen in time while progress marches right along without it.
Archduke Franz Ferdinand
The Archduke is a metaphor for everything that will be killed off as a result of the end of the ragtime. His assassination sets in motion World War I which will become the central historical turning point that divides this period from what came before and what came after. Notably, there will be a delayed effect of the Archduke’s assassination in America which will attempt to keep the status quo intact until it becomes impossible. The metaphorical status of the impact of the murder of a little-known European aristocrat is therefore inextricably linked to the sinking of the Lusitania and it is Father’s death upon that ill-fated ship which symbolically puts the final period on the era of ragtime.
