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
On the phone, Magda tells Barb that she knows what Peter meant when he said that his greatest fear was that one of his children would be a traitor; Peter’s “killer instinct” with things like tennis, she now realizes, was his effort to prevent Magda from ending up on the side of “weakness, of betrayal.” He wanted to make his kids strong so that he didn’t have to do “his duty”: kill them. Strangely, Magda is not hurt by this realization; she knows that war is a universe in which doing the right thing sometimes means doing the wrong thing. Magda has located Peter’s stone of madness: he was primed to kill his kids if they were weak, if they were “collaborators.”
Due to his experience, war became an analogy for parenting for Peter. Although it is slightly unclear what exactly Peter didn’t want his kids to become, it seems that what was “betrayal” during the war is lack of courage in Magda’s lifetime. Presumably, too, “kill” is figurative: where Peter actually killed in the war, he grilled his kids with harsh expectations during their lives. Magda understands this mentality as Peter’s “stone of madness.” It was the source of his monstrous-seeming nature.
Themes
Peter killed women and children to save women and children; however, none of the people he tried to save survived. Peter risked his life to save his Jewish friend, Wacek. After the war, Peter looked for Wacek, but he did not find him. Brushing invisible lint from his pants, Peter said that Wacek’s death was to be expected. Now, Magda feels like a “stray dog,” trying to find what is useful in these stories. Magda’s therapist says that Peter’s guilt is not Magda’s guilt; living in a safe land, Magda is able to forgive herself for her shame and fear. Once, Peter said that heroism is when a person is afraid but does something anyway. Realizing that that is what she did when she came out, Magda cries for herself and for Peter.
Nearing the end of her “reckoning” journey, Magda still does not have all the answers. In fact, many of the stories feel meaningless to her. Whatever meaning there is was never explained to her, and she is left to ravage the stories like a stray dog looking for meaning. Rather than legible answers, what gratifies Magda most is the moments of generational recurrence: the moments when she feels she has honored her ancestors in her own life. In this way, the goal of Magda’s reckoning reveals itself as a kind of homage to lineage.
Themes
