Quotation Marks
Throughout his works, E. L. Doctorow seems to avoid using quotation marks at all costs. It doesn't take long to notice this in Ragtime, and once you do, you quickly notice how superfluous they are to his writing. His ability to avoid quotation marks is itself interesting, but I also want to talk about the implications of this punctuation choice on the postmodernist setting of Ragtime. A big part of postmodernism is pushing the boundary between history and fiction. The lack of quotation marks serves as a clear blurring of this line. It makes it just a bit harder to tell what is history and where Doctorow has created his own stories. It also helps Doctorow to create "pockets of history" where he can say that some occurrence reasonably could have happened. The lack of quotation marks gives a sense that these characters didn't necessarily say exactly what is in the book, and by extension that what happens in the book is not necessarily accurate, but instead a modern day r...