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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Reckoning, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Guilt and Legacy
Morality, Survival, and Perspective
Sexuality and Shame
Body Image and Publicity
Indifference vs. Feeling
Summary
Analysis
Magda decides to go to London. Australia still feels foreign, and she hopes Europe will provide a sense of home. The day of her flight, Magda’s parents come to help her pack. Magda’s abrupt departure shocks Jane. The two share a covert kiss downstairs; secretly, Magda hopes that her absence will make Jane love her more and wait for her. Magda is running from her “crazy head,” her “broken heart,” and the ideologies that keep her from finding herself.
Magda puts an end to her relationship by leaving the country, thereby breaking her own heart with self-destructiveness. She goes about getting what she wants—Jane to love her more—in an unorthodox and ineffective way. In this way, Magda still struggles to pursue what she wants in a healthy and direct way.
Themes
In London, Magda crashes with Janne, a former refuge coworker, in her disappointingly normal flat. For two months, Magda visits pubs, punk concerts, and Karl Marx’s grave. Then, in pursuit of her ancestral home, Magda goes to Scotland, where she stays with Molly, Margaret’s cousin, and Molly’s husband George. When Magda arrives, Molly barely tears herself away from the TV to comment on Magda’s weight. Despite her initial coldness, however, Molly is kind and hospitable.
At first it seems that Magda’s trip abroad is idle—that she is only trying to distract herself. However, Magda soon ends up in her ancestral home of Scotland, as though her history is exerting a pull of which she is not fully in control. Magda seeks something from her past that will help her to make sense of her present dilemmas, although she does not seem to know yet what this is.
Themes
When Janne arrives, she and Magda attend festivals and frequent The Royal Mile Café for tea and black pudding. After the festivals, Magda and Janne take the ferry to Amsterdam. Having no money, they eat mayonnaise and sleep in spare rooms. With the help of a German who likes Janne, they go to West Berlin—the “cool place to be.” There, war-torn buildings abut new ones, and punk thrives. The Berlin Wall cuts the city like a “scalpel.” Curious to see a willingly communist country, they go to East Berlin, where the rejection of pleasure and the presence of stationed soldiers unnerve Magda; she fears what she will find in Warsaw, where, for over a year, martial law has attempted to control uprisings.
Before Magda visited East Berlin, she was an advocate of socialism. However, when she sees communism—which shares ideology with socialism—in practice, she is disturbed, particularly by the absence of pleasure. In cutting like a “scalpel,” the Berlin Wall acts like a tool that lobotomizes modernity and pleasure from West Berlin to create the sterile, utilitarian East Berlin. This calls to mind Magda’s image of the stone of madness, and it suggests that the presence of “madness”—or pleasure, in this case—is actually a good thing.
Themes
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While Janne goes to Barcelona, Magda takes a train to Warsaw. All flights to Poland have been stopped, so the train is packed. While she stands, Magda converses with a Polish student. In East Germany, a guard enters to collect five German dollars from each passenger. The guard, immune to sad stories, tells Magda—who gave the rest of her German money to Janne—to get off the train. Speaking in Polish, the Polish student addresses the passengers. Several passengers hand Magda money. Feeling guilty, Magda pays her fare.
Even before she gets to Warsaw, Magda experiences German and Polish behavior that recalls World War II. While the German guard seems to seek opportunities to thwart people, the Polish passengers have a communal and sympathetic spirit. This recalls the stories Magda hears from her family in which the Poles banded together to confront Germany’s oppression of Poland.
Themes
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The crowd thins, and Magda sits down. A nice new conductor shares salami and cheese with Magda and another passenger. At the Warsaw station, Magda is disappointed that most people wear cheap western clothes. Holding her promissory note (which Poland requires to purchase currency), Magda speaks to a guard in broken Russian. Rudely, the guard brushes past her. At a ticket counter, Magda mimes to a teller; the man leads Magda to another counter, which is closed. When Magda addresses a woman sweeping the floors, the woman ignores her. Magda reminds herself that Poland is undergoing a revolution—of course no one cares about her.
When Magda was a child, she desperately wanted to speak Polish, the language of her ancestors, but Peter didn’t her in this wish. Now, Magda encounters a situation in which her inability to speak Polish greatly disadvantages her. Magda feels a strong pull toward her ancestors and ancestral home, but experience and language both separate her from them. In this way, Magda must overcome many barriers in order to rediscover her past.
Themes
When Magda is about to lose hope, the man from the ticket counter reappears; he hands Magda a coin and points to a phone booth. Magda calls her aunt and uncle, with whom she planned to stay. The phone rings and rings; Magda is reflecting that God ignores Poland’s prayers when Andrzej picks up. Afraid her time will run out, Magda explains in German that she is not Andrzej’s daughter Magda, but Magda Szubanski, and that she has arrived early. Finally, Andrzej understands.
The only way Magda can communicate with Andrzej is by using German, the language which the Poles were forced to learn when the Nazis invaded Poland during World War II. In this way, Magda is forced to connect with her ancestors by using a language symbolic of the injustice that Poland suffered during the war; only through this negative history can Magda reach her family.
Themes
