What's up with the little boy?

**Disclaimer: So this blog post is inspired by (and largely based on) a conversation I had with Xanthe, Mr. Mitchell, and Ayat. Xanthe and I had noticed a detail in Ayat’s panel presentation that class period, and it basically turned into an “illuminati confirmed”-type discussion where we made a bunch of connections and observations about the little boy. I decided to condense those ideas (and add some new ones of my own) into a blog post. I don’t quite remember who to credit with which particular thought, so I’ll just put a disclaimer that I didn’t originally come up with a lot of these ideas, and I will give credit to Mr. Mitchell, Xanthe, and Ayat for giving me an interesting conversation to blog about!**

So first, I’ll start with the observation that the little boy seems to be the one introducing new characters into the story. In the first chapter of the novel, the little boy simply thinks about how cool he thinks Houdini is and poof, Houdini’s car is rolling down the street. Later, the little boy is watching his mother from the window when she discovers the baby. As soon as she stars digging, he races downstairs because he just knows that Mother has found something important. Finally, he is the first to see and interact with Coalhouse, and importantly, the Model T. In fact, the first thing the little boy observes is that “a new Model T Ford slowly came up the hill”, emphasis on new and Model T. All of these characters that the little boy introduces end up being very significant in the book.

In addition, the appearance of all of these characters is a lot of the time uncannily coincidental. Take for example the arrival of Houdini’s car, where the little boy is observing a fly on the window, when suddenly, it is replaced by a car coming up the street. It’s almost as if just by willing it, the boy transformed the image of the fly into the image of the car. This is the best example, but both with Coalhouse and with the baby, the boy just happens to be at the window or on the porch when the action happens, which seems incredibly coincidental, to the point of almost being unnatural. In addition, the very first observations the boy makes about a person often end up characterizing them in the rest of the novel. For example, the little boy notices on page 9, after Houdini exits the vehicle, that “He seemed depressed” (Doctorow 9). We as readers later find out that one of Houdini’s main character traits is that he is unhappy with his situation, so it’s interesting that the little boy picked up on that. In addition, one of the first things the little boy notices and says about Coalhouse is that “he was a Negro”, and Coalhouse’s race turns out to be incredibly important to the plot of the novel.

So all of this begs the question…how is the little boy doing this? It seems like he definitely has some sort of knowledge that’s beyond the scope of most characters. My theory is that, first of all, the book is written from his perspective.

For one, just thinking about the names used in the novel, it would make sense that this novel is from the little boy’s perspective. We have Mother, Father, and Grandfather – all names only a child uses. Mother’s Younger Brother seems like a reasonable thing to call a relative if you didn’t call him an uncle. Next, Sarah is called Sarah because that is what the family found out her name was, and before they knew her name, she was referred to as simply “the young black woman” which is probably what she would have looked like to the little boy. Since Tateh eventually marries Mother, it wouldn’t be far off that the boy started calling him Tateh. The one name conspicuously missing from the list is the little boy himself. Something I noticed was that although the Little Boy is sometimes capitalized, most of the time it isn’t, giving it more of an impersonal feeling, and less like an actual character’s name. In addition, he is never referred to as Little Boy, always with the article “the”, which gives it a different feeling than the other characters. In addition, most of the narration about the “main plotline” of Coalhouse is done pretty clearly from the family’s perspective, so it could very well be the little boy narrating.

But I’m going to go a step further than just that the book is written from his perspective, and claim that the boy is actually Doctorow. Chapter 15 opens with the line “The boy treasured anything discarded”, which is of course in reference to things like the old letters and thrown-out silhouettes that the boy collects (Doctorow 115). But this incredibly similar to what Doctorow does in this novel – basically the entire book is picking up under-represented or unknown stories in history (stories that have been “discarded”) and finding the amazing and fascinating parts of them.

The little boy being Doctorow actually makes the whole coincidence/omnipotence thing make a lot more sense – if the boy is the form of Doctorow within the novel, making things happen, it would make sense why so many evens center around the boy. In addition, if the boy is Doctorow, it would make sense why he always seems to be one step ahead of everyone, and just know and understand things at a deeper level than the other characters. Of course Doctorow couldn’t literally be the little boy – the dates just don’t add up. If the little boy way around ten in the 1890s, he would have had to be in his 80s when this book was written, and Doctorow was only around 40 when he wrote Ragtime. My theory is the the little boy is a way that Doctorow inserted a version of himself into his story, so the boy is just an inconspicuous, print version of Doctorow, lurking around in the novel, moving the plot along.

This theory does sound a little crazy, so let me know in the comments if you agree with me, or if you think this is just a bunch of mumbo jumbo.