Cheers for Ondaatje

In Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family, I noticed the involvment of family and stories to tell his story. These are techniques we've seen already, including using family history to tell your own, and splicedness, or the use of other stories to represent the events unfolding in the authors life. Ondaatje also introduces us to humor in his memoir, which we've been slightly deprived of thus far in class. "'Sissy,' Francis' sister, "was always drowning herself because she was an exhibitionist.'" (51) He uses humorous anecdotes about his family and the people around him, and a lot of witty one-liners. We're once again seeing a foreign account of life, but Ondaatje brings his reader into his world. This is one of the more "easy" reads we've had so far, in terms of the enjoyability and fluidity of the memoir.