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Chapter 5
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
As it happens, Sigmund Freud visits America this same year. For a few days prior to giving a lecture in Massachusetts, he tours New York City as the guest of two of his American disciples. He finds the noise, crowding, and lack of public bathrooms in the city overwhelming. One day, when they drive to the Lower East Side, they pass Tateh and Little Girl in the street. Freud experiences a fainting spell at one of Coney Island’s three amusement parks. After delivering his lectures, he briefly visits Niagara Falls. He decides he’s had enough of America when the party’s tour guide refers to him as “the old fellow” on a trip to the Cave of Winds. He beats a hasty retreat to Vienna, declaring America to be a “gigantic mistake.”
The book’s tone—short, declarative sentences, no direct dialogue, simple vocabulary—echoes a history book, as does its inclusion dozens of real historical events. But the book isn’t history—it adapts, blurs, and transforms history to suit its artistic and thematic goals. For instance, Freud’s visit occurred in the fall of 1909, not the summer of 1906, and the events in New York City and Niagara Falls are wholly fictional. They serve to inject humor—the idea of the father of modern psychology riding through a tunnel of love with one of his students is inescapably funny—and add to the book’s interrogation of the American project. Freud points out some of its flaws—like the precarious situation in which the poorest and most vulnerable members of society live.
Themes
Many would agree with Freud. The disparity between rich and poor is startling. Wealthy elites, abetted by the courts, the police, and the government, strenuously oppose the efforts of workers to unionize and fight for better wages and conditions. Child labor, racial violence, and starvation are rampant. While poor people starve, the wealthy throw poverty-themed balls which guests attend dressed in faux rags.
In the book’s first chapter, Father’s America seemed pretty good (for him at least). But the book has slowly been unfolding a different perspective for readers to consider. Perhaps, Freud’s chapter suggests, American isn’t as wonderful after all, especially not when one looks at it holistically rather than through the charmed lens of wealth and privilege.
Themes
