I would go further on this idea by saying that Houdini is a confused character that does not know where he is supposed to belong and what his identity should be based on.

Bealer puts forward a very interesting idea about how Houdini’s profession is a metaphor of his life: he is constantly trying to escape from places, which each time become more and more oppressive, just as American Capitalist society was. Losing his mother makes him confused about what his identity is, for he is expected to be a young white man, but he does not want to lose his Jewish roots, the only thing that linked him to his mother. However, there is a turning point on Houdini’s construction of identity and that is his mother’s death. Therefore, he adopts an Italian surname in hopes of creating a new identity for himself, fully embracing the identity that Mother’s Younger Brother is trying to escape: a young white man. Being a Jewish immigrant, he is lost in a “limbo” in a society divided into black and white people, for he is not either of them. At the ending of the novel, he dies fighting for a cause that is not really his, but, therefore, in some way, it could be considered that it is not really him who dies it is his body that dies, but not him as a person, as an identity, because he never really existed.įurthermore, Houdini is also a perfect example of a character who struggles with his identity because of his race. This happens repeatedly throughout the novel, being the adoption of Coalhouse’s cause in chapter XXX the most remarkable one. Because he lacks an identity, disguising as another person allows him to adopt an identity, even if it’s not his. In addition to his hiding, Mother’s Younger Brother also adopts disguises. When he feels some type of threat of being discovered, his first instinct is to hide, as it happens in Chapter 8, when he hides in the closet to not be discovered by Goldman and Evelyn. To me, Mother’s Younger Brother is the perfect example of a person in the making. He is always either hiding or disguising as other people, always protecting himself from all those expectations and stereotypes that he is expected to embrace it is not possible to know what his identity is, but it is possible to know what his identity is not.

Mother’s Younger Brother is a very mysterious character, for he does not manifest a clear identity, probably because he does not have one. However, from the very beginning of the novel, he does not show any intention of accomplishing any of those, but he does not show any other type of intentions, either. As a white young man living in the epicentre of capitalism during the beginnings of the 20th century, he is expected by his family to be making a living for himself, either starting his own business or, on the other hand, contributing on Father’s business. Mother’s Younger Brother is one of the characters about whom readers are less told but, nonetheless, it is possible to infer his thoughts by reading closely at the little information that the narrator offers. This essay, therefore, will prove, by analysing the characters of Houdini and Mother’s Younger Brother, how Ragtime is a novel that portrays the creation of identity, race being the most concerning aspect that make the characters reflect about who they are and how it defines them. It is this conflict (trying to find a midpoint between who they are and who they should be) that makes the characters constantly evolve throughout the novel. When trying to relate this metaphor to the text, the reader can detect multiple examples of characters who present a conflict between their “strong” and “weak” beats, either it is because of their race, their gender or any other reason.

The accentuation of the beats results in a melody that invites the listener to move to it, therefore, avoiding steadiness. The musical genre Ragtime is characterised by its irregularities and its melodies that seem to avoid metrical beats by accenting weaker ones (which are normally not accented). Nonetheless, the title of the novel is an important hint on figuring out the argument of the novel. What at first sight look like separate stories about completely different characters that happen to exist at the same place during the same time, is in reality a complex structure in which all characters seem to intertwine in some way or another. Defining the argument of Doctorow’s Ragtime is not an easy task.

Ragtime el doctorow works cited