[An] unanticipated glow of recognition comes over the [critic of Heinrich von Kleist, a German dramatist and short story writer,] who, reading leisurely as directed through E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime, discovers amid the likes of Harry Houdini, J. P. Morgan, and Henry Ford a black couple whose actions take on an increasingly deja vu aura. The two produce an illegitimate daughter which the mother, Sarah, buries alive. The protagonist family discovers and resuscitates the child and takes it in to live along with its mother. On the scene at the narrator's home arrives one Sunday the father of the child, one Coalhouse Walker, Jr., a proper and dignified ragtime pianist who, when refused an audience by Sarah, contents himself with genuflection at the cradle of his child and a few Scott Joplin rags at the family piano. The visits become routine, become a courtship of Sarah after the fact.
To the Kleist critic the problematic child is a familiar motif: Das Erdbeben in Chili, Der Findling; the name Coalhouse closely resembles the family name of Kleist's greatest fictional protagonist, Michael Kohlhaas; the courtship in reverse is reminiscent of the Marquise von O—. Thus, by the time the courtship between Coalhouse and Sarah is under way, Doctorow has signaled to us his familiarity with and, dare one say, indebtedness to the novellas of Heinrich von Kleist. Even the most skeptical must admit that the similarities transcend coincidence. In what follows the tactic becomes transparent: in Coalhouse Walker, Jr., Doctorow is presenting usan updated black version of Michael Kohlhaas, the sixteenth-century Brandenburg horse-trader who becomes the scourge of Saxony after a degenerate Saxon count makes him the victim of a practical joke. (p. 225)
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