Biotext: Dog Images in Ondaatje's "Running in the Family"

In the collection of excerpts making reference to dogs and in relation to Ondaatje's father, mother, and family, there are clear connections but no specific cohesion. Much like the nature of biotext in general, which requires interpretive labour on the part of the reader, so too are the potential cohesions of these excerpts left in ambiguity for exploration and interpretation by the reader.

Each member of our group seemed to take note of a different pattern or connection providing an opportunity for discussion of potential reasons for overlap in a broader interpretation of the patterns as a whole.

Ondaatje seems to have an inherent fear of dogs. They are a part of a nightmare including his father in which their mutual noise prompts Ondaatje to awaken "hot, sweating" (15). Later in the episode entitled "The Bone" dogs are described as threatening to his naked father. After his mother encounters "a different breed of dog" in his father in the tunnel she is changed (124). She seems to have been violently ravaged causing her to become strong and independent and yet somehow physically injured, exemplified in the labours of her new style of writing.

In "The Bone" the number of dogs which his father has collected blatantly coincides with the five family members of Ondaatje, his siblings, and his mother. The magnetic behaviour of the dangling dogs is a remeniscent of the description of a family that later magnetically repelled from each other and specifically from their father, "[t]he north pole" (146).

Ondaatje states that his father "loved dogs" (153) and yet in his nightmare and in "The Bone" his father is threateningly surrounded by their cacophony but also involved in the noise as in some strange communication. Perhaps his father, although loving his family, was undone by the 'cacophony' of responsibility to them. As such, in "The Bone", he collects them to keep them close, but holds them safely at bay. Even when they are cut loose, perhaps alluding to their various departures from their life with him on the island, he still holds the leashes at bay. This may symbolize their inability to ever be in his presence again.

It is easy to see the metaphor of a dog in his father. A dog can be gentle and loving, or vicious and unpredictable much like his father in states of sobriety or drunkeness respectively. His father's love of both dogs and his family coupled with the bewildering metaphor of either being a threat to him or a collected "evil" (154) is perhaps why Ondaatje begins his retelling of this anecdote by stating "[t]here is a story about my father I cannot come to terms with" (153).

The description of the dogs "splash[ing] to the ground, writhing free and escaping", invokes the notion of fish perhaps worthy of further exploration as a metaphor for the fishing industry of the island (154). As a metaphor for his family, perhaps to save themselves from watching his self destruction, they all writhed free and escaped him.


Works Cited

Ondaatje, Michael. Running in the Family. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, Ltd., 1993.