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Chapter 14
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
Little Boy takes the silhouettes because only neglected and discarded things have value or interest in his mind. He attends school dutifully although he learns little from his uninspiring teacher. He reads pulp magazines. Mother, Father, and Younger Brother—all distracted by their own concerns—mostly leave him to the care of Grandfather. Grandfather mostly tells Little Boy stories from Ovid, stories of transformation. This—especially by virtue of Old Man’s tendency to transition seamlessly between telling a story in English and telling it in Latin—both inspires and confirms Little Boy’s belief that everything in life is constantly volatile and changing.
In stark contrast to Little Girl, who isn’t even allowed to leave Tateh’s side, Little Boy experiences his family’s disinterest. They seem more rooted in their pasts and their current concerns than in the future that Little Boy, the next generation of the family, represents. For his part, Little Boy becomes keenly aware of the process of change and transformation in the world around him. And he lives (like readers at the dawn of the 21st century) in a world where things are changing at an almost inconceivable rate.
Themes
Many things confirm Little Boy’s theory about life’s instability. Sometimes objects in his bedroom seem to move of their own accord. Father came back from the arctic and Mother’s Younger Brother came back from New York physically and emotionally changed. He believes that the statues in the city parks are living creatures transformed, and he observes all the ways they continue to change by weathering, ageing, and oxidizing. He studies his own face in the mirror so intently that he falls into trances in which he feels disassociated from his body. Mother notices this habit but chalks it up to a young man’s vanity. In the winter, when Mother takes him ice skating, he’s mesmerized by the continually changing patterns cut by skaters’ blades in the ice.
Readers have reason to see gaps in Little Boy’s reasoning about objects moving or people being transformed into statues. But his wide-eyed and credulous belief in the ability of people and things to change suggests the wild enthusiasm and sense of adventure that characterized an era of massive technological advances. In an earlier chapter, the book reminded readers about the Wright Brothers’ flight—within Little Boy’s brief lifetime, human beings have transformed themselves from earth-bound creatures to beings of flight. And it’s impossible to argue with the transformations Little Boy sees in his father and his uncle, one of whom is wasting away in the new century, the other of whom is in the midst of a transformation from a 19th- to a 20th-century creature.
Themes
