Mother becomes empowered as both a feminist and her Younger Brother gets involved in radical politics. Father elects to accompany a famous real-life explorer on a mission to locate the North Pole early on in the story and in his absence, wholesale changes take place for which he is unprepared to deal upon his return. The theme of diversification also has a flip side which is revealed through incident and character. The typical American family has become a mélange of various cultural and ethnic backgrounds, thus mirroring the future of the country far more closely than the recent past. By the novel’s conclusion, Mother is now married to a Jewish immigrant who has taken the name Baron Ashkenazi and they are parents to an African-American child whom Mother saved from abandonment and eventually adopted to raise on her own. The novel begins with a focus on a tradition WASP family informed by Victorian values that are intended to be so representative of the typical family of the time they are not even given names, but referred to simply as Father, Mother, Mother’s Younger Brother. All these changes will essentially explode almost simultaneously shortly after the point at which the novel ends, thus bringing the slower pace of the age of ragtime to a close. A major plot line follows personalizes the growth of the photography industry from a leisurely one producing a single image at time to a fast-paced one based on stringing thousands of single images together to produce the illusion of movement under the oxymoronic name of motion pictures. In turn, assembly line production will soon increase the pace of manufacturing and thereby energize the movement of the American economy from a rural one heavily dependent on agriculture to an urban one increasingly dependent on factories. A Ford Model T plays a vital role in the plot as well as speaking to the increase in pace of American life that will come with assembly line production. Thus the coming revolution in music from the slower pace of ragtime to the faster rhythms of jazz becomes an unspoken but all-encompassing thematic metaphor for the entire novel.
And, as everybody knows, when it comes to jazz, some like it hot and fast.
Ragtime was the music of black America and it would shortly give way to jazz. Scott Joplin, the foremost figure in the history of ragtime music, famously urged musicians to avoid playing rags too fast. We are thankful for their contributions and encourage you to make your own. These notes were contributed by members of the GradeSaver community.
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