"You can't prove it didn't happen": Narrative tools of Doctorow in blending history with fiction
In the novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow the characters of the story who remain unnamed are constantly intertwined with the real events of history. For the most part, the characters in the story who are unnamed can be regarded as the fictional ones, but the way they interact with reality and the known historical events of the early 20th century is all too real. In order to confuse reality and play with the ideas of postmodernism, Doctorow poses the question of “why shouldn’t this have happened?” through his characters and narrative setup. In almost all of his sub narratives and chaptered sections, Doctorow introduces a historical overlap with his fictional characters that makes use of small anomalies and gaps in historical knowledge within which he can operate due to the lack of credible recorded history within that piece of the timeline. My favorite example of this strategy in the book is his use of the Peary Arctic Expedition, a mission to find the exact northmost poi...