Blog 8 – The Ball Game

Of the assigned chapters, Chapter 30 stood out to me. I found it really strange that Doctorow dedicated an entire chapter to describe the baseball game Father and the boy went to together. Though Doctorow has gone into lengthy detail before about such things, such as describing long lists of Houdini’s most famous tricks, the fact that multiple pages went into the ball game represented a change in writing style.

The descriptions of the game that Doctorow went into lengthy detail about didn’t involved Father or the boy much. Instead, he wrote about the different players, their jerseys, behaviors of the crowd, and the overall atmosphere of the stadium. Doing this made Father and the boy’s characters seems of little important when compared to the game, but that really isn’t the case. After all, Ragtime hadn’t mentioned baseball prior to this chapter.

Part of me wants to believe that Doctorow chose to write this chapter as he did to, in a way, show that even if the New Rochelle family was facing what they considered to be a terrible crisis in their lives, there is still an outside world that continues to function. In other words, when the New Rochelle family’s lives seems to halt in their tracks, the world around them went on forward. I feel that this can tie into why Doctorow focuses on so many individual characters whose connection is, at the time, unclear. Just a theory: maybe Doctorow is trying to show that these people, whether it be Evelyn, Henry Ford, Younger Brother… etc, are all facing hurdles in their lives that seem crippling, society still goes on with or without them.

I hope that makes sense.

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