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.