Fluctuation of the Narration

Something obviously unique about Ragtime was apparent in just its first pages; its structure of long paragraphs made up of short sentences and a range of subjects touched upon but never always completely connected. Reading this book's beginning chapters gave me the sense of someone describing every aspect they could remember from a certain time in their past. The way the narration mentions information that's seemingly inconsequential for the establishment of a plot could be explained through the perspective of someone that lived when all these things were happening around them; brief sentences like "Teddy Roosevelt was President" and "Women were stouter then" can be connected by that sort of context. There's a mingling of fact and opinion in the narration which reflects the question that started off the class: what makes history different from fiction? One way to know is if you've lived through an actual historical event, but afterwards the event can never be repeated. It fades into memory and seems to become about as physical as fiction can be. Being aware of this further blurs the narration's status as something either historical or fictional. 

Compared to regular fiction, I think the text of Ragtime makes you think more because it's presented as being historical, and given the historical context anything fictional makes you question its validity. As I read more of the novel, the idea of a person recalling what a certain time was like became less viable to me, maybe because there was too great of a range of things described by the narrator that one person can't know. Parts of Houdini's life, described in anecdotal events, make up part of the text along with insight into the going-ons of a fictional middle class white family. All the different parts of these events can't be known by a single narrator. Also, given the context of postmodernism there doesn't have to be a believable explanation for where the narration is coming from. Fictional information about real-life figures are dispensed throughout Ragtime, and this questions the meaning of "historical" when the historical elements are fictional.