Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Running in the Family, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Memory, History, and Story
Alcoholism
Ancestry, Homeland, and Identity
Irresponsibility in the 1920s
Colonialism
Summary
Analysis
Francis De Saram was the worst alcoholic of Mervyn’s generation, though everybody loved him. He was the first of them to “drink himself into the grave” after he intentionally drowned himself in 12 inches of lake water. One of Francis's friends consoles Francis’s wife and makes a pass at her. Francis and his friends had lived to drink, and often snuck onto ships in the harbor where they could buy their drinks duty-free. He’d hosted parties at the rubber estate where he worked and lived on “gin, tonic-water, and canned meat.” People danced into the night. The rubber estate parties ran until the end of the 1920s when Francis lost his job. He killed himself in 1935. Francis was the most loved among all his friends, and his early death and “waste of youth” puts an end to the revelry. After this, people marry themselves off.
Although Francis only briefly appears in the story, his short life and early death demonstrates the consequences of such a frivolous lifestyle. Although his friends love him and his drunken antics, it is impossible to deny that Francis’s alcohol abuse kills him, cutting short a life that should have lasted much longer. Francis’s foolish death and “waste of youth” suggests a general sense of nihilism among Mervyn and Doris’s generation—they drink, party, and avoid real life without having any real goals or accomplishments.
Themes
