Previous
How I was Bathed
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
April 8th: Ondaatje and his family drive into the Wilpattu jungle to stay in a remote bungalow. The jungle is thick, full of life warm air. He feels as if they are all “drunk” with the magic of the place. Heavy rain falls. Although none of them speak, they all emerge from the jeep and begin soaping themselves down with a communal bar of soap, letting the rain clean them. A massive wild boar emerges from the trees, watching them wearily. Ondaatje thinks that if the boar kills him, it will be a happy way to die: clean and surrounded by friends.
Ondaatje’s sense that they are all “drunk” with the feel of the jungle suggests that it is an enchanting place. Once again, his focus on the sensory details of his environment and how it makes him feel suggests that that environment he was born into plays a significant role in shaping his identity and describing the world that he came from.
Themes
April 11th: Ondaatje and company pack their belongings to leave. When he can’t find his scented bar of soap, and the cook and tracker tell him the boar must have taken it from the porch railing. After some conversation, Ondaatje agrees that they must be right. He is irritated, since that soap made him feel “aristocratic”—it was a small taste of civilization. He imagines the boar and its friends soaping themselves in the rain, mocking the humans. As the jeeps drive out of the jungle, Ondaatje searches the brush for the boar with its frothy mouth, holding the soap in its tusks.
The image of the boar and his friends soaping themselves with Ondaatje’s “aristocratic” soap is obviously fanciful, though it suggests that the Ceylonese jungle is so overpowering as to make a mockery of his attempt to import some element of modern civilization. This further suggests that Ceylon seems a whole different world, especially compared to Ondaatje’s regular life in Canada.
Themes
