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
While Ondaatje sits with Susan and her husband, he reflects on the varying natures of his parents. Despite Mervyn’s drunken antics, he could be somber and private, even reclusive. While Mervyn and Doris are married, they both love books, but Mervyn reads them to himself while Doris makes plays of them or reads the poetry out loud. Doris comes from a long line of theatrical women, while Mervyn’s actions tend to be more subdued. He detests Lalla, even though they seem the most alike of anyone, at least by their stories. Whenever the dog steals Lalla’s false breast, Mervyn closes himself in his office, apparently embarrassed, though his children wonder if he did not secretly train the dog to do this.
Mervyn and Doris’s mutual love of literature but different reactions to it suggest that they share much in common, but handle their feelings and emotions differently. Mervyn’s dislike of Lalla is ironic, since Ondaatje recognizes that they seem rather alike despite their differing natures. As a character, Lalla represents what Mervyn, in his mischievous antics, might be if he were unrestrained by his own sense of dignity during his sober days.
Themes
Mervyn has a secretive sense of humor, sharing wicked jokes just between Doris and himself. Doris loves this about him, even after they divorce. Doris is, by contrast, theatrical and public to the core, even to a fault. When Mervyn takes to drinking, she teaches her three older children—Ondaatje is too young—to sing “Daddy, don’t drink, if you love us, don’t drink.” Such moments shame Ondaatje’s older siblings, though Doris sees it as a necessary action to cure Mervyn of his alcoholism—an act of “total war” on his addiction. When Mervyn is sober, there is humor and love between Doris and him. But when Mervyn is drunk, Doris uses her theatricality to embarrass him as much as he does her, knowing that his private, gentle self will be horrified when he sobers up.
Doris’s use of her own children to psychologically manipulate Mervyn to stop drinking seems horrific, almost abusive from a distance. Even so, her love for Mervyn when he is sober suggests that although Doris’s methods are questionable, she is simply desperate to hold onto the man she loves. However, the shame that Ondaatje’s siblings feel over the performances confirms that they are damaging experiences for them. The complex interactions and wounds within Ondaatje’s family demonstrate that family relationships are complex, messy affairs.
Themes
Doris and Mervyn make their peace when Mervyn is sober and clear-minded. For Mervyn’s month or so of sobriety they are “wonderful parents,” but he once he drinks everything becomes a battle between them again. When Doris finally divorces Mervyn, she asks for no alimony or money. She takes their children away and starts working in a hotel. Ondaatje reflects that they’d fallen far in life: once both children of wealthy socialite families, now they were only a chicken farmer and a hotel worker. Doris leaves for England in 1949 and never sees all of her children together again. Each of them drift among Ceylon, England, Canada, and America. Mervyn never sees any of them, “always separate until he died.”
Although Ondaatje is careful to depict Mervyn as a sympathetic character, there is no avoiding the fact that his alcoholism breaks their family apart. Although it is only Mervyn who drinks, his addiction has a ruinous effect on the lives of each family member, including Ondaatje, who is still an infant at the time. This demonstrates alcoholism’s woefully destructive effects on individuals and families, which can last for decades.
Themes
