Erin Simonds
Period 4 English
2/7/1999
Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow, concentrates heavily on the contrast between the lives of upper-class and lower-class people. Once the several stories from the beginning make their way into one main story line, there is a recurring message. Consistently, Doctorow portrays the life of a poor person, then demonstrates how the rich man is prospering from another man’s toils. This theme was also present in The Jungle, but with very little of the upper class perspective. In The Jungle, Upton Sinclair focused the topic of the writing more on the pains of an immigrant family due to the heavy hand of the meat packing executives. The two books paint a strong picture of the two extremes of life: poverty and aristocracy.
There are many stories in Ragtime which intertwine throughout the book, but two tales in particular are complete by the time the reader is halfway through. The first is the story of Harry Houdini – or rather, Erik Weisz. Weisz was born poor in Budapest, and came to the US to succeed like many immigrants. He started his life in the US enduring all of the hardships of an immigrant in the early 1900’s. However, Weisz escaped, as Doctorow puts it. He managed to find a place for himself in Vaudeville, and after several years, found himself performing in the mansions of those aristocrats whom he so despised. In one of the more understated (but not by any means less poignant) scenes of the book, Weisz does little magic tricks backstage for an audience of circus freaks at the mansion of a Madame Stuyvesant Fish. Soon, he realizes the pitiable position in life that he and these other performers have come to, and storms out the door. Weisz realized that, for all of the success he thought he was achieving, he was still victim to the aristocracy.
On the other side of things, there is the main character of the story, Evelyn Nesbit. Many things happen to her in the book, each a point where her life crossed paths with someone just as interesting (such is the idea behind the book), but she spends a considerable amount of time with Tateh and his little daughter. Evelyn, a member of an upper-class family, had fallen victim to rumors and scandals that revolve around people of such stature. Seeking refuge in life, she made her way to a corner in Brooklyn, where she found Tateh making silhouette cutouts for five cents, with his daughter tied to his arm. Cautiously, she made her way into their lives, eventually staying in their apartment, caring for the little girl. Evelyn was fascinated by the lower-class lifestyle. She must have realized that her family crushed thousands of lives such as these on its way to the top, but she loved being able to duck away from the world.
Ragtime demonstrates that everything one person does affects someone else in the world. Doctorow concentrates more on how aristocracy victimizes the lower-class immigrant, but he doesn’t leave out the pains of being aristocracy. Doctorow shows us that each person’s life is like a thread in a blanket; for every tug or strain in one man’s life, hundreds of others are jostled as well. Even at this point, halfway through the book, the reader can walk away with a sense of how influential his own actions are.