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 reflects that many of his family members were attracted to people they shouldn’t have been. Affairs often last longer than marriages, he observes, and almost seem more permanent and respectable. Through the 1920s and 1930s until “the war,” Ondaatje recounts that “nobody really had to grow up” and so they “remained wild and spoiled.” In the second half of his relatives’ lives, the world would seem more serious, with life and death consequences. “But in their youth, passions formed complex attractions and relationships, of which only gossip remains.” Ondaatje cannot find any personal details about people amidst the rumors of affairs, only the place each person had within the “swirling social tides.” But he wants to know about it all.
Once again, the prevalence of affairs amidst Mervyn and Doris’s generation and their refusal to grow up suggests that, for the wealthy classes, the 1920s are an era of recklessness, passion, and a general ignorance of any real consequences to life. The wealth of gossip and lack of personal information from that time suggests that no one did anything of particular importance. The war that Ondaatje refers to is World War II.
Themes
