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
At a formal dinner, Gillian tells the story of how Ondaatje was bathed when he was five, attending Catholic school. As Gillian tells it, the prefect in charge of the young boys ruthlessly dragged them into the bathroom, ordered them to strip, and violently threw water at them. She scrubbed each down in turn with a fury, holding them by the hair, before throwing them toward the wall to dry. The dinner guests laugh with delight at the story, which is almost certainly exaggerated. At night, Ondaatje wonders he doesn’t remember such a traumatic incident himself, or why no one ever spoke to him of it before this.
Ondaatje uses Gillian’s story to explore the use of exaggeration to preserve the past. Although Ondaatje seems to suspect that Gillian’s story is exaggerated—which demonstrates memory’s unreliability—the story that Gillian tells is vastly more memorable than Ondaatje simply being bathed by a prefect. By embellishing the story, Gillian helps it stay in the listeners’ minds, thus preserving the past better than if she had told the story dryly and factually.
Themes
