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
After Peter dies, Magda moves in with Margaret for three months. Friends of Margaret and Peter are dying all the time, and Margaret has stopped going to the funerals. Magda, who is sitting in Peter’s recliner next to Margaret, tries to find something other than the Midsomer Murders and ads for coffins to watch on TV. Margaret says that if hell is real, there are a lot of people in it. Now that she’s no longer in denial about Peter’s death, Magda feels like she is having a spiritual crisis.
Throughout Magda’s life, Peter has been the character who knows most about death. In fact, he knows too much, having witnessed many deaths and committed murders. However, this understanding of death did not necessarily give insight into the afterlife. Here, with Peter gone, Magda and Margaret attempt to grapple spiritually with the death of someone well versed in death’s effect on life.
Themes
A week later, Magda visits a Buddhist center for a meeting. A red-robed monk says that it would be bad karma to be reincarnated as a lion. Magda is indignant—Peter’s star sign is Leo. In a scene from Animal Planet, an impala, whose herd’s weakest member is being corned by a lion, suddenly turns and flings itself at the predator. Do such prey-attacks-hunter actions flout the rule “thou shall not kill?” Magda fears for Peter’s soul; she hopes Buddhism will assure her that Peter is not burning in hell.
In searching for a religion or worldview that accepts Peter, Magda looks for forgiveness, knowing that Peter’s actions require it: he did not lead a blameless life. Thus, Magda is concerned with Peter’s soul in a Christian sense. Instead of resigning him to a spirituality that holds no one accountable after death, she hopes that Peter’s sins are cleansed so that he can go to heaven.
Themes
When Magda asks what a person should do in a case of “kill or be killed,” the center falls quiet. At last, the monk says that he does not know; then he says that it might be better for a person’s karma to die rather than to kill. Magda realizes that survival is not a legitimate goal in the Buddhist faith. Magda feels a powerful indignance toward anything that casts Peter in a negative light: no one had been tested the way he was. Then, she remembers how monks in Tibet and Burma withstood torture and even pitied their abusers. But what Peter’s family did was not selfish: they put themselves in danger to help the Jews. Magda wonders if there is any soul wise enough to understand what the right thing is to do.
Magda’s mind goes in circles when she tries to answer the question of Peter’s goodness. Every time she decides that he undoubtedly did the right thing in choosing to kill rather than to die, she thinks of an example of goodness where someone chose the opposite path. Ultimately, she justifies opposing actions, concluding that there is no such thing as a black and white system of right and wrong. Rather, people choose paths based on what they deem good—something that varies depending on the person.
Themes
Six months later, Magda is asked to play a grumpy, nerdy spelling bee contestant, William Morris Barfée in Spelling Bee, an adaption of a Broadway musical. Magda—now 46—enjoys the challenge of playing a male teen going through puberty; After the hugely successful opening night, Magda gets a call from the producer of a radio program, asking her to sit on a discussion panel with the Dalai Lama the next morning. Magda is thrilled; she, like many people, reveres the Dalai Lama—the “repository of hope.”
Significantly, Magda describes the Dalai Lama as a “repository” of hope rather than an inspirer of hope. This emphasizes a potential role for spiritual figures. Rather than making their followers hopeful, they can themselves contain all the hope that their followers cannot feel. In so doing, such spiritual figures seem to keep the world steady by providing a center of hope.
Themes
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The next morning, while she has her makeup done before the panel begins, Magda is warned to address the Dalai Lama as “His Holiness.” After, Magda sits with the other panelists. Then the Dalai Lama enters, wearing a white scarf, which he places around Magda’s neck. Magda, who expected something magical to happen, reflects on the Dalai Lama’s easy life. She wonders how he would he cope if he were faced with difficult circumstances. Magda feels that the Dalai Lama is judging the darkness in her heart.
Magda’s initial reaction to the Dalai Lama is not favorable; she resents that he is endowed with so much significance considering that his life has been so easy. This suggests that people who have or are attuned to trauma have to go a long way to feel reconnected with the good: they must first learn not to resent the good, not to other themselves with their own hardship.
Themes
From the Dalai Lama, Magda wants “the blueprint for goodness”; she wants forgiveness for Peter—the “lion in suburbia.” Magda sees the Dalai Lama’s “magic”: coping with so many people’s problems, he is a sane person in the midst of a “mad world.” Magda wants to ask whether Peter was a good man and what the Dalai Lama would have done if he had been in Peter’s place. But per the producers’ instructions, however, Magda asks what people should teach children in order to change the world; the Dalai Lama talks of training the mind and heart to do good even in tough times. Though Magda doesn’t leave the show transformed, she believes that the Dalai Lama has planted a “seed” in her that now begins to grow.
Magda wants the Dalai Lama to give her plans that she can use to construct goodness. In this, she reveals her wish that goodness was not as relative and ambiguous as Peter’s history makes it seem. By the end of her time with the Dalai Lama, however, Magda sees that his power has nothing to do with creating good in the world around him. Rather, in embodying the good, the Dalai Lama has a stabilizing effect: the world swirls chaotically around him while, like the center of a wheel, the Dalai Lama’s steadiness keeps order.
Themes
