“I wanted to touch them into words:” Examining the Contrasting Roles of Storytelling in Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed Esther Oziel College

In both Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje and The Lesser Blessed by Richard Van Camp, the male protagonist is deeply affected by a problem-drinking father. In The Lesser Blessed, Larry Sole’s father becomes physically and sexually abusive when he is drunk. As a result, Larry ends up killing his father and lives with graphic and traumatic memories of him. In Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje’s father’s alcoholism drives his family away and he eventually ends up killing himself in a drunken spell, which prohibits Michael from ever having a relationship with his father. There is a distinct difference in how the men view their fathers: Michael romanticizes the memory of his father while Larry is horribly traumatized by the memory of his father. Their contrasting memories of their fathers influence how they respectively use their storytelling as a coping strategy. Michael uses the act of storytelling in order to bring himself closer to his father and learn more about him through others’ stories, but Larry uses it to externalize his trauma and distance himself from his father. In Running in the Family and The Lesser Blessed, both Van Camp and Ondaatje show how storytelling can be used in contrasting ways to achieve the...