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
Around this time, Magda appears on Who Do You Think You Are, a reality show that follows famous people as they trace their family history; the show’s crew had found “juicy” details about Luke McCarthy, Magda’s grandfather. Although Magda is not curious about Luke or Ireland, she agrees to be on the show. When Magda tells Margaret that she is going to Dublin, Margaret cries wistfully, then she snaps that it is not a big deal. Below Margaret’s humorous eyes there always lay a deep sadness; Magda wishes she could hug her mother’s childhood self. In one of few photos that exists from Margaret’s childhood, Luke stands with his wife Meg, and daughters Margaret and Mary.
Throughout her memoir, Magda has primarily been interested in Peter’s past: Peter’s past is what haunts her, scares her, and regenerates within her. Here, however, we learn that Margaret too had an interesting past, tinged with both happiness and sadness. Similar to how she feels toward Peter, Magda wishes she could go back in time and right her mother’s wronged childhood. Together, Ireland and Poland make up Magda’s legacy.
Themes
From Margaret, Magda learned that Luke was funny, talkative, and a big drinker; however, her aunt Mary told her of Luke’s bad temper, which only Margaret was brave enough to stand up to. Luke revered his mother, Mary Jane, whose rosary beads Margaret lost. Magda does not know why Luke left Ireland in a hurry; Margaret suspects it was because he belonged to the IRA. When the Who Do You Think You Are crew interviews her, Margaret says that Luke woke screaming every night from shell shock.
Like much of Peter’s past, Margaret’s ancestry contains elements of both good and bad. On the one hand, Luke is remembered favorably, while on the other, he is remembered as abusive and himself traumatized. This goes to show that a person’s character is difficult to define, containing an ambiguous mix of good and bad elements.
Themes
When Magda arrives in Dublin, she meets genealogist Elizabeth Cuddy who shows Magda a 1911 census recording that 10 of Mary Jane’s 13 children died, not including miscarriages and stillbirths. Devastated, Magda wonders if she has subconsciously braced against her family’s loss her whole life: it might be why she never wanted children.
In her hotel that night, Magda chokes on a room service potato: the symbol of Ireland’s suffering. Sobbing, her head swirls with images of Mary Jane’s dead children. Magda wonders if her nightmares of dead bodies had pointed to this history. How will Magda tell Margaret that only Luke lived to reproduce?
Years before, Magda suffered from dreams of dead children lying half-buried in dirt. She had always assumed these dreams were Holocaust imagery passed down from Peter’s side of the family, but she now knows another source of her generational trauma.
Themes
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The next day, Magda goes to Factory Street in County Laois to see Luke’s childhood home: a tiny cottage with a dirt floor where 15 people lived. Magda wonders how Mary Jane coped with the death of her children: did she blame herself? did she feel like Job in the Bible? Feeling a surge of anger, Magda thinks of the jokes people make about the shame and suffering of the Irish; how much loss can a person bear before it mutilates them?
Whenever Magda explores her family history, her mind is filled with complicated questions she wishes she could ask of her deceased family members. This reiterates the point that there are some questions—particularly those of endurance and character—that Magda will never be able to answer.
Themes
From Elizabeth, Magda obtains a sheet listing teenage Luke’s arrests, all involving drunkenness. Once, Luke tried to rob a Protestant church and was jailed for three years. Afterward, having no prospects, he was sent to fight in the trenches. With a war specialist, Magda goes to the National Museum of Ireland and looks at photos (exactly replicating her nightmares) of the trenches: pits of rotting bodies. When Magda tells Margaret about Luke, Margaret says calmly that times were tough. Again, Magda wonders which response is more humane, more useful: feeling, or not feeling.
The museum photos replicate Magda’s dreams, a fact that illustrates how trauma is passed down through generations within a person’s subconscious: Magda has never seen rotting bodies in trenches, but her mind seems to receive the memories and perceptions of her ancestors such that Magda has access to these images. Unlike her ancestors, however, Magda is in a position of safety to feel all the emotions that naturally accompany such imagery.
Themes
From Ireland, Magda goes to Scotland; at Edenhall, where Luke was hospitalized for shell shock, Magda meets a researcher of war trauma, Yvonne McEwen. As if reading Magda’s mind, Yvonne says that trauma is genetic—that a memory of trauma is stored in one’s genes. Yvonne shows Magda footage of the “hysterical gait” that befalls those with shell shock.
That trauma is genetic means that it is inescapable. In raise their children in Australia, Peter and Margaret did not escape their pasts. As their daughter, Magda inherits their experiences, although she is often unable to predict how they will re-emerge.
Themes
Afraid that Magda is learning only horrible things, Margaret insists that Luke was fun. Yvonne says that shell shock patients were treated cruelly, but Margaret claims that Luke loved the fruit trees that the patients tended and wanted to be buried under an apple tree. Luke was also a great talker. However, his talk never became action—Peter recalled waking to enact a business plan he had hatched with Luke the night before, only to have Luke laugh in his face.
Margaret’s outlook on her father’s past shows her optimism and pride. Refusing to let her ancestors be colored by horror and grief, she chooses to remember the good things. In this, Margaret also shows remarkable courage: her past did not beat her down or corrupt her; she still sees the good in things.
Themes
When Peter fell ill, Margaret relived her father’s hospitalization. At six years old, Margaret fell into the creek and muddied the dress her mother made for visiting Luke in the hospital; to this day, Margaret is stricken with guilt. Years later, Magda bloodies her dress before visiting Peter in the hospital; Magda now realizes that Margaret, who slapped Magda that day, was in fact slapping herself as a girl. Luke grieved his daughter, dead of pneumonia, and Peter grieved his son. Magda is part of this circular clash of Poland and Ireland, and she knows there is no right answer. All one can do is forgive oneself.
Readers do not learn until now that Magda’s bloodying of her dress—which occurs in an early chapter—was in fact a generationally recurring event. Along with this realization, many other recurrences occur to Magda. These recurrences create a “circular class”—a paradox in itself. Certain patterns reinforce each other while others refute each other, creating the sense that there is in fact no pattern—there is no way forward except to accept it all.
Themes
