Ragtime as “false document" Narratives and a constructed world in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime

Abstract

According to E.L. Doctorow, there is no genuine difference between fact and fiction: “there is only narrative.” He believes that “the regime of facts,” the epistemological dominant of the world we live in, “derives its strength from [prescribing] what we are supposed to be.” In this sense, our microcosm does not merely revolve around the scientific dogma of its own infallibility, but the ruling scientific discourse defines us in our very beings and demarcates our agentic horizons. In short, it imprisons us. In Doctorow ‘s view, only literature can offer us a way out of the tyranny of this rationality. For, fiction, speaking in the vernacular of freedom, has the ability, by revealing what we “threaten to become,” to transform the stories that govern our world. Ragtime testifies to this awareness, put forward in “False Documents,” in the present work I will rely on Doctorow’s essay as a key to interpret the novel and my aim is to show how stories govern the microcosm of Ragtime, condition the subjectivity and fate of its characters, and how stories themselves offer a liberation from normative constraints.