The False Hero - A look into Coalhouse Walker's strange existence in Ragtime

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From the very beginning, E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, a paradigm of postmodernist historical fiction, is perfectly unapologetic in the way it presents itself. For instance, take the blatantly unrealistic introduction of Harry Houdini in the first few pages of the book; with the inclusion of such a plot point, it’s obvious that Doctorow is willing to leave realism at the doorstep and replace it with whatever nonsense he pleases. For a good part of the story, Doctorow is allowed to reign free in this manner: by treating characters like puppets or exploiting the loopholes and incompleteness within “real” history, he demonstrates his control over Ragtime’s narrative and all of its elements, both factual and fictitious. However, this all changes after the introduction of Coalhouse Walker Jr., a strange, almost out-of-place character that serves as the driving force of the story’s plot. What makes Coalhouse so special and, more interestingly, how does he manage to loosen Doctorow’s grip on the very reality which he created?

Ragtime and Normality

At its core, Ragtime is a story of the ordinary. Most characters we consider to be wholly fictional, such as Father, Mother, or Tateh, are all embodiments of the status quo—characters so reflective of their own demographics that they aren’t even given names to purposely underscore their lack of individuality. Father, the typical white man who owns a company, goes on expeditions overseas, and is (for the first part of the story) the patriarch of the household, Mother, the unsatisfied wife who finds herself bound by the societal limitations of her sex, and Tateh, the Jewish immigrant who strikes it big in the States—the American dream, personified. The unoriginality of these fictional characters and their backgrounds is hard to miss, likely an intentional play on Doctorow’s part to back up his “you can’t prove they didn’t exist” mindset. But then, there’s Coalhouse Walker; to our knowledge, he’s still a completely fictional character just like Mother or Tateh, but he just doesn’t seem to follow the same constraints as the others. Hell, he even gets a name.

When we first encounter Coalhouse Walker, his departure from typical African American social norms of the early 1900s is already evident. His distinguished tone, confidence, and sharp sense of style are so uncommon for a black man of the time period that Father has a hard time comprehending it, exemplified by his odd conclusion that Coalhouse “didn’t know he was a Negro” (Doctorow 162). Thus, before the Ragtime pianist so much as utters a word, he is already breaking the unspoken law that fictional characters in this universe must conform to the average, and in this way, overturning the boundaries set out by Doctorow which we’ve come to expect. 

The False Hero

Until Coalhouse Walker’s appearance, regularity is the governing force of the Ragtime universe; it’s just ordinary people living ordinary lives. Hence, why we felt as if the first parts of the book lacked any plot at all. After the pianist shows up, though, everything goes astray. Not only does Coalhouse begin to cause real, tangible issues by casually becoming a terrorist, but his singularity begins to rub off on other fictional characters: most notably, Mother’s Younger Brother. Younger Brother’s encounters with Coalhouse sort of wake him up; he breaks free of the normality, and, by association, Doctorow’s control. By the end of the “Coalhouse Arc”, we no longer see Younger Brother treated with the same irony as before, nor do we see Doctorow able to get in his head—he can’t see through the young man’s eyes anymore. When Doctorow writes “We know from Younger Brother’s journal…” (Doctorow 268), he’s insinuating that Younger Brother has escaped from his fictional bindings and become history; history, in the form of a hypothetically real, written document which Doctorow is now regarding as fact.

So, in a sense, it’s as if Coalhouse Walker is freeing these fictional characters by being the extraordinary character he is. He’s like a hero in the sense that he’s freeing them, but importantly, he’s also simultaneously forcing them to exit the fictional world. The two fictional characters Coalhouse had the most significant impact on were Younger Brother and Father, and both end up dying, leaving their old reality behind through actual historical events (i.e. Mexican Revolution and sinking of the Lusitania). 

Conclusion

To me, it’s like Coalhouse Walker was never supposed to exist at all. Until his introduction, Doctorow had always been careful about finding loopholes in history to work with, so that his story couldn’t be disproven. Coalhouse takes those precautions and throws them out the window, much like he refuses to submit to Doctorow’s control. He wasn’t Doctorow’s creation*, so of course he wouldn’t match the rest of the characters. It’s not just that Coalhouse Walker doesn’t follow the rules of the Ragtime universe—It’s that he was never a part of it to begin with. 

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*Doctorow based Coalhouse off of another character, Michael Kohlhaas. I’m basically suggesting that Michael just waltzed into Ragtime as Coalhouse, screwed stuff up, and left.