Jailed
In Ragtime, Doctorow's implements ways of imprisoning each of his characters. These imprisonments don't have to be physical imprisonment but also emotionally and socially. Almost every character has a prison of their own but I'm going to only talk about a few of them that looked interesting to me. One of them is Houdini's prison. It's kind of ironic that his career is made feats of escaping the inescapable prisons. He is imprisoned by his emotions when his mother died. He was obsessed with communicating with his dead mother. For someone who likes progression, he was stuck in place. He even dressed as his mother when trying to establish contact with the afterlife. I also felt like Houdini was imprisoned by society. I think society didn't accept Houdini as a member because he was a performer. An example is when he was publicly shamed in the hospital while visiting a hospitalized man. Because of this, he was afraid to perform when he was invited to perform fo...