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
As Ondaatje walks along the beach with his children, they find the body of a large reptile, eight feet long. The beast looks like a crocodile, but with a short, rounded snout. Ondaatje recognizes it as a kabaragoya. Local belief states that if a child eats the tongue of the kabaragoya’s smaller relative, the thalagoya, they will someday become a brilliant speaker. The tongue must be swallowed whole, sandwiched between two slices of banana. Uncle Noel did this when he was young, though he choked and spat half of it out. What he did swallow made him so sick he almost died. Thalagoya is also used to treat vomiting and morning sickness, and as a child Ondaatje used to steal these animals’ eggs and throw them at rivals.
Once again, Ondaatje includes such anecdotes not to impart a critical element of the story, but to give the reader a sense of Ceylon’s culture and everyday practices, since it is the world he comes from. In this instance, Ondaatje relates some of Ceylon’s local superstition to the reader, even held by wealthy aristocratic families like his. At the same time, since Uncle Noel becomes a lawyer as an adult, Ondaatje wryly and implicitly suggests that their may be some element of truth to superstition. This playful, flimsy attitude toward truth and fact marks the memoir as postmodern.
Themes
