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
Ondaatje rises before the sun, listening to the rain. He focuses on every detail. “My body must remember everything.” Every smell and feel and sound speaks of the world Ondaatje left when he was 11, of the world his mother and father lived in. All before his other life, before he “dreamed of getting married, having children, wanting to write.”
Ondaatje ends his memoir by soaking in every sensory detail, absorbing the environment. This once again suggests that the details of Ceylon and the environment he was born into, and that his parents lived their lives in, are important elements of his own identity.
Themes
