Irresponsibility in the 1920s Theme Analysis

Ondaatje’s memoir is in large part an attempt to reconstruct his parents’ early lives and understand who they were in their youth and as adults. The stories he pieces together are revealing, but unflattering. As young adults, Ondaatje’s parents and their friends exemplify the spirit of the 1920s era in which they come of age: wealthy, irresponsible, and with little awareness of any real consequences in life. Ondaatje’s recounting of his parents’ generation suggests that, especially for the wealthy, the 1920s were a time of debauchery, irresponsibility, and nihilism with consequences that echoed through future generations.

Ondaatje describes his parents’ early adult years as an era of wild partying and rash decisions, suggesting that for those coming of age in the 1920s, life seems to have little weight or consequence. Both Mervyn and Doris are born to wealthy Ceylonese families and spend their twenties drinking, partying, and gambling. Mervyn spends two years in England, pretending to be enrolled at Cambridge but actually spending the tuition money his parents gave him on expensive rooms, parties, and several brief engagements to foreign women. Doris spends all of her time drinking and practicing exotic dances with her sister. When Mervyn returns to Ceylon and marries Doris in 1932, he buys her an expensive engagement ring and charges it to his father, Philip, then threatens to kill himself when his father refuses to pay for it. By Ondaatje’s description, such behavior is obviously childish and rash, but not unique to his parents, suggesting that the 1920s and early 1930s were the defined by erratic, irresponsible behavior. Ondaatje recounts that his parents and relatives’ social circles at the time were rife with affairs and cheating spouses: “Love affairs rainbowed over marriages and lasted forever—so it often seemed that marriage was the greater infidelity.” Along with irresponsibility, the prevalence of cheating spouses suggests that the era was also defined by widespread adultery. Ondaatje is critical of this time in his parents’ lives, saying, “From the twenties until the war nobody really had to grow up. They remained wild and spoiled.” He later calls this period of wild partying “the waste of youth. Burned purposeless,” suggesting that in spite of the fun, the generation that came of age in the 1920s was nihilistic, wasting their most vital years on shallow pleasures.

With the onset of World War II in the 1940s, Ondaatje’s parents and their wealthy friends are forced to grow up and reckon with a serious, dangerous world, indicating that the threat of global conflict put an end to the frivolity of the 1920s and early 1930s. Ondaatje credits the end of this irresponsible period to the threat of global war and regional fighting. He states, “It was only during the second half of my parents' generation that they suddenly turned to the real world." For instance, Ondaatje’s Uncle Noel, a lawyer, suddenly finds himself defending his former partying friends’ lives in court after they take part in a local insurgency. The sudden seriousness facing Mervyn and Doris’s generation suggests that life-and-death consequences of war force them to recognize the reality and responsibility of adulthood that they’ve formerly avoided. Things also change for Ondaatje’s parents on a more personal level: although Mervyn continues drinking as a middle-aged man, as his children are born he ceases partying and the drinking takes on a sullener tone. Rather than drinking socially, he often drinks alone to quell his depression and even attempts suicide while drunk. Mervyn’s slow downfall, even in the midst of raising a family, suggests that for some people in his generation failed to effectively from habitual irresponsibility to actual adulthood.

Even after Ondaatje’s parents mature and set aside their partying and rashness, their children and grandchildren feel the impact of their irresponsibility, suggesting that the consequences of such brash living echo into future generations. The greatest impact of Mervyn and Doris’s long refusal to grow up is arguably Mervyn’s dependence on alcohol—initiated during his partying years—which ultimately splits the family up after Doris takes her children and leaves Mervyn. The consequences of Mervyn’s irresponsible behavior are what ultimately deny Ondaatje the chance to truly know his father. In addition to familial instability, both Mervyn and Doris squander the wealth they inherited from their studious, hard-working parents on parties, alcohol, and unsuccessful business ventures. Ondaatje reflects on the great heights from which both his parents fell, saying, “They had come a long way in fourteen years from being the products of two of the best known and wealthiest families in Ceylon: my father now owning only a chicken farm at Rock Hill, my mother working in a hotel.” Both Mervyn and Doris’s fall from wealth to near-destitution impacts not only themselves, but their children, since there is little to leave to them. This further demonstrates how the irresponsibility and nihilism of those who came of age in the 1920s created consequences that echo through subsequent generations. Ondaatje’s depiction of his parents’ generation suggests that they and their friends fail to grow up until very late in their lives, to the detriment of their children and grandchildren.