Michael Ondaatje's “Well-Told Lie”

Abstract

Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family is nominally a memoir, but this classification does not do justice to the textual play found in the work or to the author's elusive identity as both writer and subject. I argue that Ondaatje creates a historiographic identity that is both historically referential and textually created. This identity is significant first in that it renders irrelevant ethical critiques leveled at Ondaatje: that his work acknowledges neither his own ethnic identity nor his ancestral complicity in the colonization of Sri Lanka. It is also important to Ondaatje's aesthetic project and is crucial to the emotional climax of the work, in which Ondaatje and his alcoholic father merge within the grammar of the text, accomplishing a reunion that would be impossible in real life. In my analysis, the criticisms of Ondaatje actually point to the central success of his memoir: the translation between and transcendence of both generic and referential expectations.