Memory, History, and Story Theme Analysis

Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family is often categorized as a post-modern memoir, though it relays much more of Ondaatje’s parents’ lives than his own. The narrative intersperses personal memories, contradicting accounts, and magical realism to convey as much of Ondaatje’s familial history in Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka) as Ondaatje can piece together, especially regarding his father, Mervyn, whom he barely knew. Although Ondaatje’s stated goal is to rediscover his Ceylonese ancestry and understand who his father truly was, the author openly admits that his memoir is “not a history but a portrait or ‘gesture,’” and takes many creative liberties to communicate what he believes is the truth. To uncover the past, Ondaatje’s memoir blurs the lines between memory, history, and story. Ultimately, the book suggests that “history”—in the Western sense of a single, authoritative record of the past—is subjective and unreliable, ignoring others’ perspectives. Instead, the past is preserved in personal stories and memories, both true and untrue.

Ondaatje intersperses his memoir with various outdated historical observations that have since proven to be inaccurate. By including these details, Ondaatje suggests that Western “history” is unreliable as a singular record of the past, since it often romanticizes colonial actions and ignores the grievances of colonized peoples. For example, Ondaatje’s brother hangs various “false maps” of Ceylon in his home, drawn by venerated European explorers and cartographers before the country was colonized. Each map was drawn after seeing Ceylon at a distance from a passing ship, without a complete understanding of Ceylon’s geography. The maps’ creators variously describe the island’s shoreline as an “amoeba,” a “stout rectangle,” and other shapes until successive attempts draw closer and closer to its true form. The succession of false maps that developed over time symbolize how the past cannot be accurately understood through a single account from a fixed perspective, which is as likely to be wrong as the mapmakers were about Ceylon’s geography. Although many European explorers viewed Ceylon as a wonderful “paradise,” romanticizing their experiences on the island, Ondaatje includes a Ceylonese poem that reads, “Don’t talk to me about Matisse […] / where the nude woman reclines forever / on a sheet of blood […] / To our / remote villages the painters came, and our white-washed / mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.” The native population’s memory of violence contradicts the romanticized tale that Europeans told of their arrival. This contradiction demonstrates the manner in which “history” as told by the Europeans is unreliable, one-sided, and incomplete.

Rather than lean on historical records, Ondaatje shapes his understanding of his family’s past from friends and relatives’ memories which, though imperfect, build a rich and multifaceted record of the past. This suggests that rather than a singular authoritative history, the past is better preserved through the various memories and personal accounts of individual people. Ondaatje spends much of the narrative recording dialogues with family members and old friends of his father, and their conversations loop and swirl around various events, often contradicting one another but always revealing something new. He recounts, “No story is ever told just once […] we return to it an hour later and retell the story with additions and this time a few judgments thrown in.” Later, describing the way that his aunts’ stories create the past, Ondaatje states, “They knit the story together, each memory a wild thread in the sarong.” The manner in which Ondaatje uncovers his family’s past through numerous personal memories suggests that the past is better preserved through collective remembrance, rather than a single account written down by an authoritative figure. Although many of the memories contradict each other and thus cannot all be true, by listening to so many, Ondaatje is able to circle closer and closer toward the truth. Just as the iterations of false European maps gradually reflect the true geography of Ceylon (after seeing the island from many angles), the many perspectives of his family’s history give him a dynamic, many-sided understanding of his forebears. Although this approach depends on unreliable, subjective memories, the author’s earlier criticism of a fixed, authoritative view of history suggests that memory is no less reliable than officially-recognized history.

Along with memories, Ondaatje intersperses his narrative with nonfactual stories (the author admits this in his “Acknowledgments”) which still provide insight into the past despite being fictional. The value of these tales suggests that even fanciful stories can help to preserve and reveal the past better than a reductionist historical narrative could. One particular story unsettles Ondaatje while also giving him insight into his father’s depression and anxiety. Ondaatje has already heard the story of his father drunkenly diving headfirst off a train, but another family member tells it differently. In this alternative account, Mervyn instead dives into the jungle and emerges hours later, stripped naked, holding a handful of stray dogs in front of him at arm’s length, hanging them by their leashes. The dogs are powerful, and Mervyn is holding them to protect himself from them, as if “he had captured all the evil in the regions he passed through and was holding it.” Even after a friend cuts the hounds free, Mervyn holds his arm out straight, holding the ends of the leashes. Although the story is told to Ondaatje as fact, he “cannot come to terms with” it and doubts its veracity. Even so, the image of his father emerging dazed from the jungle, focused only on holding evil at bay from the world and himself, reveals to Ondaatje a yet-unseen element of the severe anxiety Mervyn struggled with throughout his life. This revelation demonstrates how even stories that are not factual may still be useful for understanding the truth of the past. Ondaatje’s memoir presents a concept of history that spurns a single, authoritative voice in favor of a complex interweaving of memories and stories, most of which are only partially true, but together form a dynamic, many-sided understanding of the past.