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
In the early afternoon, Ondaatje sits in an old Dutch-built governor’s home in Jaffna, Ceylon. The rooms are massive, the doorways 20 feet tall. He’s spending the afternoon with his sister Gillian and his Aunt Phyllis as Phyllis tries to explain the confusing web of relationships in their extended family. They first sit in one of the bedrooms, but the bedroom feels haunted, so they move to the dining room instead. Ondaatje loves Aunt Phyllis because she remembers the past. She was a close companion to his father. They spend the afternoon swapping “anecdotes and faint memories,” circling back to stories already told to add new details or a firm opinion. Aunt Phyllis tells him about the various “good and bad Ondaatjes.”
The bedroom’s haunted quality suggests that the past lingers so heavily, Ondaatje can almost feel it, indicating that the exploration of the past will be a primary theme in the book. Aunt Phyllis’s method of recalling the past—telling a story, moving on, then circling back to it later to different details, or a new judgment of the events—demonstrates the way that memory can provide greater insight than a single, authoritative voice of historical record, since new details and perspectives furnish the original story.
Themes
Ondaatje observes, “There are so many ghosts here.” A governor’s daughter, prevented from being with her lover, killed herself in that house in 1734 and her ghost “lives” in one of the mansion’s wings. She regularly haunts visitors, appearing to them in a red dress. Nobody sleeps in that wing.
The house’s haunting and visitors’ active efforts to avoid the haunted areas suggests that the past is so significant to the present that it has an actual impact on people’s lives—they choose to sleep in other rooms, rather than disrupt the past.
Themes
At night, Ondaatje has a vision of himself standing amidst a great human pyramid of his ancestors. He is near the top, though a few stand above him. The pyramid chatters together and lumbers slowly through the mansion’s massive rooms.
The pyramid symbolizes Ondaatje’s place in his own ancestry. His position above many of his family members suggests that he figuratively stands on their shoulders, on their legacies—both good and bad. The people above him represent his own children, who in turn stand on his shoulders and are impacted by his own actions and choices.
Themes
