Redrawing the Boundary between History and Fiction

Redrawing the Boundary between History and Fiction: A Note on E. L. Doctorow s Ragtime

Ragtime, E. L. Doctorow’s startlingly popular novel published in 1975, is characterized by its episodic style and correspondingly its deconstructive reaction to the traditional realism. These features of the novel reflect the way that Doctorow attempts to bring the traditional boundary between history and fiction to its limits, and thereby to rethink how historical developments get constructed even in his narrative creation. Based on the assumption that history has always bound to the reinterpretation and reorganization of reality through its discursive logic of what seems to be real, this noel presents a historiographic discourse on the era of ragtime both by framing historical reality in the quasi-documentary mode of narrative and by combining historical images with purely fictional ones in the playful, episodic and discontinuous fashion.