Employing "False Documents" Against The American Central Historical Myths

E. L. Doctorow is an outstanding serious novelist in American literature field today,he is famous for writing about the American history. His works often drawn from those described and interpreted historical events, to transgress into "the realm of myth whose myth is history"-- those without repeated testing, question and thinking to become ingrained , extremely dangerous system as a dissenter. Through the creation of "false documents", Doctorow want to fight the American central history myth, restore the neglected and lost voice in history, to challenge received ideas about his country's past and express his radical critique of modern American experience. This is Doctorow's poetics of engagement, intensively reflecting his pursuit for history truth.Doctorow's Welcome to Hard Times subverts the reader's ideal imagination of western heroes, American western exploitation as a history of civilization spread, and the myth of the west as a land of progress and hope through the parody of Western. By comparing the west in art reality and the west in the myth, it broke the belief that American civilization is the source of happiness and prosperity .In Ragtime, a seemingly impeccable world of America is ironically juxtaposed against one where minority groups are denied their equality and justice,which mocks and overthrows the history in people's eyes or the accepted history.According the series of contrastive narration, readers can notice that at the turn of the century of American, the society is not "there are no blacks. no immigrants", but full of conflicts between the white and the black. The theme of America at the turn of the century is not science and technology progress and industrial mania , but the illusion of progress and life predicament.The March spreads the civil war into many personal viewpoints. All the characters in the novel have become a conscious or unconscious witness, forming a small but important unit in the "floating world". Doctorow avoided the unified and positive description that the civil war is to liberate the slaves and safeguard national unity, and the unitary evaluation of general Sherman is god of victory and war villain in official documents. Through the multiple witnesses, Doctorow highlighted the social unrest and the loss of human nature in the war, and Sherman as a ordinary person, which sharply satire and irony the many American collective memory of the civil war.Doctorow set his novels in important periods of American history, in order to examine those central myths in American social life. Out of his belief in democracy and-truth,Doctorow resorted to "false" documents to challenge the legitimation of the "true"documents and break their monopoly over history. His fictions restores complexity and ambiguity to the American social life, offering another more realistic interpretation .