Ragged Company

Of the five main characters and narrators in Ragged Company, four are people without homes. Despite this, Granite—the character with a roof over his head—is presented as experiencing the same sense of rootlessness as the others. On separate occasions, different characters even remark on this: Both Digger and Mac, Granite’s old editor, remark on how his life experiences have rendered him as “homeless” as the others in some sense. Thus, from the outset, the idea of home and what it truly means forms one of the book’s central themes.

One of these conceptions of home is that of a state of belonging and being accepted somewhere. Accordingly, Book 1 is titled “Shelter” and Book 4 is titled “Home,” hinting that part of the characters’ journey in the book is moving from looking for shelter to finding home. In this journey, they’re aided by different things, which separately make up other, important themes in the book: Fortune, Fate, and Individual Destiny, and Personal History and the Power of Storytelling. However, one of the main components of this journey, as the title indicates, is the experience of friendship, and forming a family—the “ragged company” they come to be, as Amelia refers to the group when Granite insists that he enjoys their company.

The book presents different ways of arriving at friendship. Shared circumstances are one, which is how Amelia, Digger, Timber, and Dick initially band together. While the “shadowed ones” bring the men to Amelia, the loyalty they develop toward each other is a function of their shared experiences of living on the street—a characteristic of the “rounder” mentality, as Digger explains.

The friendship they develop with Granite, however, differs slightly. They come together within the same setting—the movie theater (once again, aided by the “shadowed ones”)—but shared external circumstances don’t bond them together as much as shared internal experiences: love, loss, grief, and pain. By watching and talking about the movies together, the unlikely group realizes that although the details of their individual stories may be different, the human emotions experienced through them remain the same at their core. This is something all five can relate to and becomes what they share in common.

Thus, part of the group’s journey, with respect to the friendship and family they form, is recognizing that relationships between people are based on more than just the material or the external. Dick, in his childlike simplicity, understands this from the very beginning. He feels most at home and safest among his friends, and he doesn’t distinguish between Granite and the others; to this end, he bequeaths a significant amount of money to Granite in the same way as he does the others.

Digger, in contrast, has the hardest time with this; he’s constantly suspicious of the “Square Johns,” and his barriers are up toward Granite, Merton, and Margo until the very end, even resulting in a fallout. He can resolve his past demons and move on only after he realizes the genuineness of the relationships that exist between Granite and the others. He finally arrives at the same realization that Timber does after Dick’s disappearance: that ultimately, home is belonging in someone’s heart. In this way, the idea of home remains strongly rooted in the bonds of friendship and found family.