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Tongue
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
A poem, signed, “for Hetti Corea, 8 years old,” enumerates how awful the subject’s voice is to listen to. It is “like a scorpion pushed through a glass tube / like someone has just trod on a peacock.”
Ondaatje’s memoir includes various poems and writing by other people, letting their works mingle with and comment on his own. This motif is often called “intertextualism” and is a hallmark of postmodern writing.
Themes
