randomm..?

That title isn't actually very helpful, given how regularly Ragtime is random. Random made-up people meet random historical characters and they get into super random situations. I mean the whole Mother's Younger Brother in the closet scene, that is random. But some more random things happened in the latest reading assignment, ending with Chapter 21.

The first thing was that Henry Ford meets Pierpont Morgan. They discuss all of the things that Morgan has spend his time and money learning, and my reading of it was that Ford was very confused the whole time. That is until the end, when he speaks up and tells Morgan what about reincarnation, and how everything that he wants to know can be found in a book Ford read when he was a boy. I really wonder at Doctorow's intentions behind having these two characters meet. His narrative style is so ambiguous that I can't tell if he is trying to undermine Morgan by showing Ford to know everything, or if he's trying to make Ford look stupid by thinking that he knows everything.

The next random event is that Sarah, the black woman who Mother took into the house with her child, has a suitor. We barely even know this girl, and it seems to me that we learn much more about her suitor, Coalhouse Walker Jr., than we learn about her. Eventually they get engaged. This was so sudden to me, but with Doctorow, I feel like all you can do is accept what he tells you and move on to the next chapter. I think Doctorow does a good job of showing the views towards African Americans at that time through Father, because the whole time they are getting to know Coalhouse, the thoughts running through Father's mind are borderline (if not out and out) racist. Mother is more progressive, however, and encourages the relationship. We do learn a lot about Coalhouse, but by the end of the chapter, we still don't know how they met, and it is never explicitly said that Coalhouse is the father of the baby. I'm not sure if they'll show up again, but I kind of want to know the backstory...

So, these two random happenings fit in well with all of the other random events in the book. Oh E. L. Doctorow, why do you choose to confuse us so.