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 recollection of the past, shaped modern day biases, and assuming that the reader will hold the same biases. These quotation marks seem to represent the entire goal of this novel, blending History and Fiction into one interweaving story.

Comments

  1. Emi L.February 7, 2020 at 8:03 PM

    Interesting. It's the same with mumbo jumbo: when I see the words a character is speaking on the page I get a feeling like I wasn't sure if they were actually speaking or not. They could have been thinking it, but then another person responded so guess they were speaking. It's a little trippy, like I don't know immediately that dialogue has begun and figure it out halfway through the sentence. I like this interpretation, it's better than any explanation I had for why postmodernist writers can't seem to use quotation marks (the smudge like appearance of " " ruins the aesthetic of their sentences?).

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  2. Charlotte EbelFebruary 9, 2020 at 11:40 AM

    This is some really nice insight on something that I basically skipped over when reading Ragtime. It's really interesting how Doctorow makes it hard to make any sort of easy distinctions, whether it's differentiating between history and fiction or between narration and dialogue. Another way that the lack of quotation marks impacted my reading of Ragtime was how hard it was during extended conversations to determine who was talking. There were sections I had to read multiple times to try to figure out who was talking, and this might've also been a strategy used by Doctorow to destabilize the reader a bit and make them read closer.

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  3. ZillesFebruary 9, 2020 at 5:16 PM

    I think that not using quotation marks gives the author (Doctorow) more power in that he can paraphrase the character's dialogue and place his own influence on it (If he wants to). I agree that it may also be to blend history and fiction or weave them together. In general I think the purpose is probably derived from the postmodernist "I can do what I want to, and you can't stop me" idea. I think that blurring the lines, gives everything a sparkle in a mysterious way. I also think that it may flow better without the constant back and forth of descriptions bumping into long blocks of dialogue, but I don't know for sure.

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