Previous
Chapter 13
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Ragtime, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The American Dream
Replication and Transformation
Freedom, Human Dignity, and Justice
The Cult of Celebrity
Women’s Roles
Social Inequities
Summary
Analysis
Father returns home from the North Pole expedition much changed—he’s thin, worn-looking, always cold, and he has a slight limp. His family has changed, too: Little Boy is now in school, and Mother has taken over—with great industry and capability—many aspects of the business. She’s also sheltering the little Black baby and its depressed mother (Sarah). And she has become far more affectionate in bed. Father finds this especially disturbing, because her newfound sexual appetite reminds him of the Inuit women—specifically, the one he had sex with (to his great shame) while on board the Roosevelt. The gifts he brings home seem savage in the family’s genteel parlor. Everyone treats Father like a convalescent, and indeed, he spends most of his time sitting in the parlor with his feet propped near an electric heater.
Father has changed physically but not in terms of his values, beliefs, or outlooks on life. Instead, his time away seems to have confirmed, in his mind, the rightness of all that he believed before he left. Unfortunately for him, his family has changed in more meaningful ways. Left in charge of the household and aspects of the business, Mother has stepped up and discovered her own competence. Perhaps more importantly, she’s stopped feeling the need to consult Father on all her decisions. Notably, Father’s racist dislike for the Inuit women didn’t stop him from having sex with one. This, like his gifts, not-so-subtly hints that the real savagery lies in his old-fashioned opinions, not the Indigenous folkways he was exposed to or Mother’s newfound sexual appetite.
Themes
Mother’s Younger Brother has changed, too, mostly because Evelyn left him for a ragtime dancer. He’s grown thinner, paler, and quieter, but also more driven. He spends up to 15 hours a day hard at work in the fireworks department, designing new rockets and an unusual firecracker called the Cherry Bomb. One day he and Father go out to the salt flats along the shore so Younger Brother can demonstrate his invention. It’s much louder than the standard firecracker but—as he demonstrates by standing directly over one as it explodes—no more dangerous.
It's clear by now that Younger Brother has a somewhat obsessive personality. He’s just transferred his energy from pursuing (and subsequently pleasing) Evelyn into his work. In a way, his deteriorating mental health aligns him with the dangerous explosives he designs—both can explode at a moment’s notice. Younger Brother needs to find a cause to believe in and pursue if he is to survive this crisis.
Themes
When he returned to New Rochelle, Younger Brother brought with him Evelyn’s collection of Tateh’s silhouette portraits and a pair of her shoes. He’s haunted by his memories of Evelyn—sometimes he hears her voice in his ears or smells her scent in his empty room. One night, he throws the portraits and shoes away in a fit of heartbroken rage. Little Boy retrieves the portraits.
As with the cherry bomb and other explosives, throwing away the portraits shows that Younger Brother has a destructive streak. The fact that Evelyn left them behind, too, symbolizes the shallowness of her connection to Tateh and Little Girl. They abandoned her, and then she abandoned Younger Brother. Relationships built on obsession clearly don’t create healthy or stable connections.
Themes
