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.
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.
I don't know that I'd consider the bizarre sequence with Morgan spending the night alone in the depths of a pyramid waiting for a god to appear "boring," necessarily, but I see what you're saying about the structure in this last chapter. In some ways, the "historical/ironic" voice we identified early on, which largely recedes during the more plot-driven portions of the narrative, returns for this final "montage." These long paragraphs, which combine informative narration with pithy and ironic observations about the "meaning" of this historical information, sounds very familiar from some of the long paragraphs we looked at earlier in the novel. Maybe this is abrupt, after we were following Coalhouse's story so closely; but there's a lot going on in these final vignettes in terms of the novels themes, and it seems both open-ended and closed, in a peculiar way. "Open" in the sense that it seems aware that any idea of "historical era" is an imposed and arbitrary fiction, and "closed" in the sense you discuss here--all the loose ends in the story seems to be wrapped up.
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