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
When Magda is 16, she and her friends apply to work at the new McDonald’s; however, Magda is not hired. She then applies to every store at the mall, and a café hires her as a dishwasher. Two days later, however, the café fires her for being lazy. Margaret attributes Magda’s lethargy to hypoglycemia, a condition with which Barb had once been diagnosed by a doctor named Grüber.
As a condition marked by blood sugar dropping below normal, hypoglycemia can suggest malnutrition. If Magda had hypoglycemia, it could be that the diets and medicines prescribed for her weight are negatively affecting her health. In this way, prejudices around plus-sized bodies can result in attacks on physical health.
Themes
When the family mispronounces doctor Grüber’s name, Peter corrects them. Peter, with ironic nonchalance, tells a story: after the Warsaw Uprising, Peter went to a POW camp. When the Soviets attacked in 1945, the Germans retreated, taking the prisoners with them. As part of Hitler’s Death March, the attempt to walk prisoners to death, leading them through bitter cold conditions; the Germans shot anyone who got sick. Peter and several others escaped, hiding in a haystack. Making their way to a house where an old Polish man lived, they hid until the man’s grandson naively told a passing German patrol—whose leader was Grüber—about them.
Coming after descriptions of Peter’s insensitivity and even cruelty toward his kids during their adolescence, Peter’s story inspires sympathy for him by describing horrors he faced in the war. When Peter was an adolescent himself, he had no home and no one whom he could trust. Everyone Peter encountered wanted to either kill or betray him, so Peter put his emotions aside out of necessity. The reminder of this experience gives context for Peter’s parenting style.
Themes
Killing time until the war ended, Grüber and the prisoners walked, talking about football and movies; he dodged other German patrols and let the prisoners sleep inside in beds. Sometimes, the prisoners carried the patrol’s rifles to share the load. When Grüber let them go so that they could work in a factory, another patrol caught Peter and his friends and sent them to a camp. When they were freed by the Soviets, Peter stayed with single women to protect them from the Russians, who were given the freedom to do whatever they pleased to the prisoners. As far as Peter knows, Grüber spent the rest of the war skiing with his prisoners. Someone shot Grüber the day the war ended, but Peter can’t remember who.
Although Grüber was a Nazi and technically the enemy, he was on the right side of the conflict—against murder for the war’s cause and intent on avoiding mindless harm. Grüber is an example of Peter’s claim that there were good people on both sides of the conflict and that war complicates morality.
Themes
