Mervyn Ondaatje Character Analysis

[Mervyn] bought Doris a huge emerald engagement ring which he charged to his father’s account. His father refused to pay and my father threatened to shoot himself. Eventually, it was paid for by the family.

The waste of youth. Burned purposeless. They forgave that and understood that before everything else. After Francis died there was really nowhere to go.

Love affairs rainbowed over marriages and lasted forever—so it often seemed that marriage was the greater infidelity. From the twenties until the war nobody really had to grow up. The remained wild and spoiled.

Humorous and gentle when sober, [Mervyn] changed utterly and would do anything to get alcohol. He couldn’t eat, had to have a bottle on him at all times. If his new wife Maureen had hidden a bottle, he would bring out his rifle and threaten to kill her.

Eccentrics can be the most irritating people to live with. My mother, for instance, strangely never spoke of Lalla to me. Lalla was loved by people who saw her arriving from the distance like a storm.

[Mervyn and Doris] were both from gracious, genteel families, but my father went down a path unknown to his parents and wife. She followed him and coped with him for fourteen years, surrounding his behavior like a tough and demure breeze.

Everything is there, of course. Their good looks behind the tortured faces, their mutual humor, and the fact that both them are hams of a very superior sort. The evidence I wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other. My father’s tanned skin, my mother’s milk paleness, and this theatre of their own making.

It is the only photograph I have found of them together.

[Mervyn and Doris] had come a long way in fourteen years from being the products of two of the best known and wealthiest families in Ceylon: my father now owning only a chicken farm at Rock Hill, my mother working in a hotel.

Words such as love, passion, duty, are so continually used they grow to have no meaning—except as coins or weapons […] I never knew what my father felt of these “things.” My loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult. Was he locked in the ceremony of being “a father”? He died before I even thought of such things […] I am now part of an adult’s ceremony, but I want to say I am writing book about you at a time when I am least sure about such words.

The dogs were too powerful to be in danger of being strangled. The danger was to the naked man [Mervyn] who held them at arm’s length, towards whom they swung like large dark magnets. […] He had captured all the evil in the regions he had passed through and was holding it.

[Mervyn] would swing wildly, in those last years—not so much from sobriety to drink but from calmness to depression. But he was shy, he didn’t want anyone else troubled by it, so he would keep quiet most of the time. That was his only defense. To keep it within so the fear would not hurt others.

I keep thinking of the lines from Goethe… “Oh, who will heal the sufferings / Of the man whose balm turned poison?”

“You must get this book right,” my brother tells me, “You can only write it once.” But the book is again incomplete. In the end, all your children move among the scattered acts and memories with no more clues. Not that we ever thought we would be able to fully understand you. Love is often enough, towards your stadium of small things. Whatever brought you solace we would have applauded. Whatever controlled the fear we all share we would have embraced.

[Mervyn] bought Doris a huge emerald engagement ring which he charged to his father’s account. His father refused to pay and my father threatened to shoot himself. Eventually, it was paid for by the family.

The waste of youth. Burned purposeless. They forgave that and understood that before everything else. After Francis died there was really nowhere to go.

Love affairs rainbowed over marriages and lasted forever—so it often seemed that marriage was the greater infidelity. From the twenties until the war nobody really had to grow up. The remained wild and spoiled.

Humorous and gentle when sober, [Mervyn] changed utterly and would do anything to get alcohol. He couldn’t eat, had to have a bottle on him at all times. If his new wife Maureen had hidden a bottle, he would bring out his rifle and threaten to kill her.

Eccentrics can be the most irritating people to live with. My mother, for instance, strangely never spoke of Lalla to me. Lalla was loved by people who saw her arriving from the distance like a storm.

[Mervyn and Doris] were both from gracious, genteel families, but my father went down a path unknown to his parents and wife. She followed him and coped with him for fourteen years, surrounding his behavior like a tough and demure breeze.

Everything is there, of course. Their good looks behind the tortured faces, their mutual humor, and the fact that both them are hams of a very superior sort. The evidence I wanted that they were absolutely perfect for each other. My father’s tanned skin, my mother’s milk paleness, and this theatre of their own making.

It is the only photograph I have found of them together.

[Mervyn and Doris] had come a long way in fourteen years from being the products of two of the best known and wealthiest families in Ceylon: my father now owning only a chicken farm at Rock Hill, my mother working in a hotel.

Words such as love, passion, duty, are so continually used they grow to have no meaning—except as coins or weapons […] I never knew what my father felt of these “things.” My loss was that I never spoke to him as an adult. Was he locked in the ceremony of being “a father”? He died before I even thought of such things […] I am now part of an adult’s ceremony, but I want to say I am writing book about you at a time when I am least sure about such words.

The dogs were too powerful to be in danger of being strangled. The danger was to the naked man [Mervyn] who held them at arm’s length, towards whom they swung like large dark magnets. […] He had captured all the evil in the regions he had passed through and was holding it.

[Mervyn] would swing wildly, in those last years—not so much from sobriety to drink but from calmness to depression. But he was shy, he didn’t want anyone else troubled by it, so he would keep quiet most of the time. That was his only defense. To keep it within so the fear would not hurt others.

I keep thinking of the lines from Goethe… “Oh, who will heal the sufferings / Of the man whose balm turned poison?”

“You must get this book right,” my brother tells me, “You can only write it once.” But the book is again incomplete. In the end, all your children move among the scattered acts and memories with no more clues. Not that we ever thought we would be able to fully understand you. Love is often enough, towards your stadium of small things. Whatever brought you solace we would have applauded. Whatever controlled the fear we all share we would have embraced.