ABSTRACT
The fictional characters like Coalhouse Walker take on a certain gravity as they enter history while the representative figures of the age are both illuminated and demythologized, as in Freud’s boat trip through the Tunnel of Love with Jung. Doctorow’s revisioning of American history bears comparison with that of John Dos Passos and, indeed, several critics have drawn attention to the similarities between Ragtime and USA. In USA history and fiction are treated as distinct entities and separated into discrete compartments of narrative, newsreel, biography and autobiography. The view of history presented here is more dialectical than cyclical. At times, particularly in the story of Coalhouse Walker, Doctorow’s treatment of history is deliberately anachronistic in the way it reshapes the past to parallel the present. For Dos Passos, history has an objective order which provides the structure of his fiction.
