Character Clues

Character Analysis

Location

You know what they say about real estate: location, location, location. And in New York it says everything about who you are, how much money you've got, and where you're from. On the Lower East Side are the tenements, where Manhattan's immigrant population lives. Here "children died on beds made from two kitchen chairs pushed together" (3.4), while on Madison Avenue J.P. Morgan lives in a brownstone "designed in the Italian Renaissance style" (20.1).

When Tateh walks the streets of Madison and Fifth Avenues, his heart is "outraged" (3.2), though he and his family walk quickly in that part of the city because "the police did not like to see immigrants" (3.2).

Meanwhile, our upper class family lives in New Rochelle, New York, a suburban city just to the north of New York City. Coalhouse Walker, Jr. and many of the African American population, live in Harlem, which is where Coalhouse is trying to get to when his car is vandalized by the all-white volunteer firehouse near New Rochelle.

Clothing

Clothing is not just a sign of how much money you have, but also of how progressive you are. While the men are, for the most part, confined to the usual suits and derby hats, Doctorow shows how things are changing in dress with the women.

When we meet Mother in the beginning of the novel, she is dressed primly and in corsets, while at the end of the novel, when she is walking with Tateh in the rain in Atlantic City, her "white dress and underclothes lay against her so that ellipses of flesh pressed through."

Evelyn Nesbit also wears a tightly bound corset, which Emma Goldman reacts to by saying: "You ought to be ashamed of yourself. Look at me... I wear everything loose and free flowing, I give my body the freedom to breathe and to be" (8.9).

Even Mother's Younger Brother gets in the act. In the beginning, we first meet him in his "linen suit and boater" (1.1.). During the course of the novel he'll join Coalhouse's gang, shaving his head and wearing blackface, and end the novel as a Zapatista, with "cartridge belts crisscrossed over his chest" (40.6).

Names

Names, and the lack of them, mean a great deal in Ragtime—though only one main character actually gets a full name.

That would be Coalhouse Walker, Jr., who Doctorow names after a character from an 1811 novella published by Heinrich von Kleist. His name is Michael Kohlhaas, and he suffers a tragedy similar to what Coalhouse goes through.

But what about the lack of names? Our upper class family is only named by their roles: Father, Mother, Grandfather, Mother's Younger Brother, and Little Boy. It's the same with our Jewish family—Tateh is the familiar Yiddish term for father, and his daughter is simply Little Girl. However this changes when Tateh succeeds at the end of the novel as a movie-maker. He adopts a title, "Baron Ashkenazy" (33.9), which he takes on to get him "around in a Christian world" (34.4). "Ashkenazi" refers to Jewish people from the Central and Eastern Europe.

The famous—J.P. Morgan, Evelyn Nesbit, Emma Goldman, Henry Ford, Sigmund Freud, Harry Houdini—all are named, of course. Which is maybe why Doctorow decides not to name the non-famous characters. After all, the famous have left their names etched in the history books, while Father and Mother and Little Boy are observers who, while not necessarily making are history, will be affected by it.