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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Running in the Family, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, History, and Story
Alcoholism
Ancestry, Homeland, and Identity
Irresponsibility in the 1920s
Colonialism
Summary
Analysis
Michael Ondaatje states that “what began it all” is a nightmare about his father standing in a jungle, surrounded by angry wild dogs. He wakes from the dream and finds himself sleeping on his friend’s couch during the beginning of the Canadian winter.
This opening immediately establishes Ondaatje’s relationship to his father as a central tension. The contrast between the dream’s jungle and Canada’s winter suggests that Ondaatje’s current environment is dramatically different from his father’s home.
Themes
A friend once told Ondaatje that when he drinks, he knows exactly what he wants. Two months later, Ondaatje is dancing drunk at his own farewell party before making his journey to Ceylon, he realizes that he is returning to the family and childhood he left behind. He wants to “touch them into words.” He wants to understand his family and his childhood home. Until now, he has made it all the way into his mid-thirties without understanding what it all meant.
Ondaatje’s sense that he does not know his own family or understand his own childhood suggests that he is unsure of who he is as an adult. His desire to understand his family’s past provides the first hint at how critical understanding one’s ancestry and environment is to forming one’s sense of identity.
Themes
