I've noticed a recurring theme while reading Doctorow's Ragtime. I'll call it duplication, though it might be more accurate to say "the same thing happening or existing repeatedly, sometimes in a different form". The little boy fixates on this in Chapter 15, playing the same records over and over "as if to test the endurance of a duplicated event" and stares at himself in the mirror for hours, entranced by the idea of creating a second self. He wholeheartedly believes his grandfather's stories, which describe bodily forms as fluid, changeable. The boy's obsessions call to mind Morgan's belief in reincarnation, specifically his belief that he himself is the reincarnated form of an Egyptian pharaoh. The same being, different forms, over and over.
Ford, too, believes in reincarnation, in more ways than one. His assembly line creates the same exact car, over and over. It's workers are interchangeable; any position is fluid; various people might fill the same position over time, but their purpose in the machine is the same. To move away from the abstract a bit, Tateh appears to literally invent the flip book (although a quick Wikipedia search tells me they existed as early as 1868) which show the same scene, over and over, the exact same each time.
I can't figure out though, why Doctorow focuses on this. It is clearly intentional (if nothing else the boy's fixation on duplication is explicit). Is this Doctorow calling to our attention the nature of his novel, viewing historical fiction as a duplication of the past and wanting us to consider and acknowledge the genre's inherent imperfection? An interesting thought, but I'm more inclined to think right now it's a nod to a theme of the period he's writing in. Perhaps everyone is so obsessed with re-creating things because music stored on a disk, the assembly line and mass production are the exciting new inventions of the Ragtime Era.
