Class Levels in Ragtime
In Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow there’s been an ongoing discussion of how class affects the character’s lives in the novel. We are immediately introduced to a fictional middle-class white family that lives in a three-story house with a generic, happy life. They are oblivious to the poverty and social strife that’s happening around them saying there were no black people and no immigrants (4). A couple chapters later we’re introduced to an immigrant family that is clearly living a lower-class life. The narrator describes, “they sewed from the time they got up to the time they went to bed” (15), showing that the family must work all day to make ends meet and yet still struggles. Doctorow places these two families next to each other to show these very different classes are living amongst each other in the city at the same time. Harry Houdini also has struggled with class being an immigrant who does escape tricks. A problem that Houdini has that we discussed in class is that – despite the s...