Ragtime : Michael Kohlhaas :: Life of Pi : Max and the Cats

Class discussion towards the end of Ragtime about Doctorow copying from Michael Kohlhaas reminded me of a conversation that I had with a Brazilian exchange student a few weeks ago. The student told me that Life of Pi was copied from a work by a Brazilian writer. I went home, googled this, and found that Yann Martel, author of Life of Pi, had borrowed the plot from Moacyr Scliar's Max and the Cats.

Max and the Cats follows a man named Max who is fleeing Nazi Germany after he is reported to the secret police for having an affair with a married woman. He is on a boat with few passengers and many zoo animals, headed for Brazil. The boat is sabotaged and sunk. Max manages to escape into the sea on a life boat, and finds that he is sharing the boat with a jaguar. At one point, he entertains the thought that the jaguar could be trained. At the end of his many days afloat, it is revealed that there was never a jaguar on the boat with Max.

Life of Pi is about an Indian boy named Pi who climbs aboard a lifeboat, but is on the boat for completely different circumstances. He finds a tiger on his boat, and sails with it for many days until he reaches land. At one point he tries to show the tiger that he is the alpha male. Like Scliar's book, readers find out that there was never a tiger on the boat with Pi.

The similarities are obvious. But just like Doctorow surrounded the plot of Michael Kohlhaas with many other stories, Martel adds so many more parts to the plot of Max and the Cats that it is transformed.

 In Life of Pi, Pi is joined by a female orangutan, a hyena, and an injured zebra. The hyena kills both the orangutan and the zebra, then is killed by the tiger. At the very end of the book, when this incident is investigated, it is revealed that each animal on the boat was actually a human being (each a metaphor for a human?), and that the tiger was Pi himself. This is so much more complex than Max and the Cats. Additionally, Pi and the tiger stumble upon an island made of carnivorous, acidic algae that is inhabited by meerkats. What this is a metaphor for, I don't know, but it surely is something that Max and the Cats doesn't have.

Just like Life of Pi is "copying" from Max and the Cats, Ragtime borrows the plot from Michael Kohlhaas, while adding on so much more. In addition to several other characters, fictional and historical, Ragtime is different from Michael Kohlhaas in that it weaves all of these characters together instead of just substituting them for characters from Michael Kohlhaas.

I think borrowing plots works, but it may be more acceptable to first ask the original author first before following a certain book so closely in plot.

Non-character-centered ending to Ragtime

After turning past the page with IV in the center, and laying eyes on Chapter 40, I was assaulted with a seemingly endless sequence of large paragraphs that daunted me. Pages of information on every character in the book, especially J.P. Morgan, bored me. I was hoping for a more climactic ending, but was disappointed. Then I remembered that Doctorow was trying to portray the early 1900s as a time period, not as a period in a few character's life. An exciting ending wouldn't make sense; it would most likely be completely fictional, and would not prove any point about the early 1900s.

As mentioned in class, the ending was like the ending of some movies and documentaries, with a "this is what happened to him afterward" section for each character. It gave me the feeling that these characters, the ones that didn't get killed off, were living and surviving outside the scope of the book's plot. J.P Morgan was still living, fulfilling his dreams in Egypt. Mother and Tateh got married, and created a family with a bright future. These character's stories are clearly not over. They still have milestones waiting for them on the horizon.

Unlike many movies and novels, these characters aren't emerging from the wreckage of a final battle or continuing on with their lives with life-changing knowledge. They just make do with what they've got.

The last paragraph of Ragtime continues the stories of characters while ending the time period that Doctorow depicted with the rest of the novel:
"The anarchist Emma Goldman had been deported. The beautiful and passionate Evelyn Nesbit had lost her looks and fallen into obscurity. And Harry K. Thaw, having obtained his release from the insane asylum, marched annually at Newport in the Armistice Day parade." 
Emma Goldman and Evelyn Nesbit have sad "endings" (although "endings" isn't the right word because their stories have only ended in the book, not in the Ragtime reality). As the reader approaches the last lines of the novel, these "endings" leave a lot of questions unanswered. But they also open the mind to a range of possibilities for Ragtime's characters that makes the novel seem more historical and less fictional.