Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Reckoning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Guilt and Legacy
Morality, Survival, and Perspective
Sexuality and Shame
Body Image and Publicity
Indifference vs. Feeling
Summary
Analysis
Magda Szubanski prefaces her memoir with the admission that anyone who met her father would not believe that he had been an assassin. Zbigniew—or Peter—Szubanski appeared to be a warmhearted family man with a boyish charm. He was social, liked tennis, and played the harmonica. When Hitler invaded Peter’s homeland of Poland, Peter, then 15, joined the war. Magda grew up in the “shadow” of her father’s attempt to come to terms with the “power over life and death” he had during the war. Thinking of a Bosch painting depicting the 15th-century historical phenomenon of surgeons removing the stone of madness from insanity patients, Magda confesses that she can feel a stone of madness in herself: the legacy of her father’s guilt and shame.
Szubanski uses the stone to madness to visualize disordered thinking and behavior, which is otherwise imperceptible and untraceable. As something that occurs in the mind, insanity or unusual behavior cannot be traced to a material cause in quite the same way that physical illnesses can be. The stone of madness—which 15th-century doctors falsely identified as a physical source of insanity—reveals the desire to locate a cause for something that cannot be explained. Peter’s guilt and shame are invisible in him. Through the stone of madness, Magda assigns a cause to her father’s invisible and troubling nature, and she also expresses her desire to make sense of this nature.
Themes
