“… as if history were no more than a tune on a player piano”: Chronotopic Representations in Ragtime and Billy Bathgate

Abstract

It has been over four decades since E. L. Doctorow’s number-one bestseller, Ragtime (1975), established him as one of America’s most celebrated novelists. Over the course of the decades, Doctorow produced a valuable body of works which, despite their thematic and structural differences, reflect a unique view of American life and values. While some critics state that Doctorow saw capitalism as the evil foundation of the American society, others contend he was more preoccupied with the stylistic techniques which enabled him to represent a fictionalized history of the United States. The present article aims to explore temporal and spatial relations in Doctorow’s Ragtime and Billy Bathgate. The study employs the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of chronotope, which signifies the interconnectedness of temporal and spatial elements in a literary work. Thus, the current study explores physical as well as psychological manifestations and significations of chronotope in the above novels. The research demonstrates that the evolution of key characters in both novels would be impossible without the development of the temporal-spatial elements in the narratives.