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
Unlike Philip’s brother Aelian, who is kind and generous, Philip, Ondaatje’s paternal grandfather, is “strict” and “aloof.” Both brothers are lawyers, though Philip becomes immensely wealthy through real estate investments and retires when he is 40. He builds the family estate, Rock Hill, on a prime piece of property in the town of Kegalle. Although he loves his family, his family fears his powerful will. Philip is determined to dress and present himself like an Englishman, which his family grates against. Sometimes, on afternoon walks, he dresses in a traditional sarong and finally seems to fit “the landscape around him.” Philip dies before World War II and a massive argument erupts at his funeral about how much to pay the pallbearers, prematurely ending the ceremony. Aelian dies four years later.
Philip’s seriousness contrasts with Mervyn’s childish recklessness, which hints at Mervyn’s eventual downfall from the heights of high-society. Philip’s desire to dress and compose himself like an Englishman suggests that he sees the European foreigners as somehow superior, to the ire of his family. Much like Ondaatje’s identity crisis as a Sri Lankan living in Canada, Philip seems conflicted about his own identity as a Ceylonese man who desires to be English, rather than accept his place in his family legacy.
Themes
Rock Hill sits mostly empty for the next decade until Mervyn returns there alone in the late 1940s. Gillian and Ondaatje spend some holidays with him. Mervyn remarries in 1950; his second wife Maureen and two new children Jennifer and Susan live at Rock Hill with him. Mervyn takes up chicken farming and separates himself from his old friends, though he suffers dipsomania and continues to drink. He stays sober for two months at a time, then binge drinks for days on end. Although he is gentle when sober, he is monstrous when drunk, and even points a rifle at Maureen and threatens to kill her if she won't give him alcohol. Mervyn eventually dies, which Maureen announces with a dispassionate note.
Ondaatje organizes his narrative by subject, rather than chronologically, and thus he moves backward and forward through time, skimming over events and then returning later to flesh them out in detail. This method of storytelling parallels the way Aunt Phyllis and other relatives recount their memories of the family, giving the memoir the air of a personal story rather than a precise historical record. Mervyn’s drunken threats of violence demonstrate how alcoholism can turn a gentle-hearted man into a monstrous destructive figure.
Themes
Ondaatje and his half-sister Susan revisit Rock Hill as adults with their own families. The once large house now seems small and overgrown. The only thing familiar is the polecat which Mervyn was fond of, since it was his only company one drunken afternoon. When Mervyn first found the polecat, he was out of alcohol, so he drank the kerosene out of the lamp instead. Ondaatje reflects, “Whatever ‘empire’ my grandfather had fought for had to all purposes disappeared.”
Nature’s overgrowth of Rock Hill reflects the manner in which time and alcohol overtake Mervyn’s once wealthy and abundant life, wasting the fortune that Philip labored for. The image of Mervyn drinking kerosene as a substitute for alcohol is particularly tragic and suggests that his alcoholism and dipsomania are so fierce that the illness drives him to desperation.
Themes
