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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
Whenever Magda travels for work, she calls her parents and tells Peter—whose father never showed affection—that she loves him. Magda and Peter’s long-distance conversations become more and more raw until one night, when calling Peter after a day of filming Dr. Plonk in Adelaide, Magda feels that she is talking to a different man—Peter’s 16-year-old self. This is the kind of conversation Magda has been dreading and craving her whole life, and she wonders how she’ll react if Peter tells her something that she can’t bear to hear. After hanging up the phone, Magda sets aside the notes she took during the conversation, planning to transcribe them the next day. In the morning, she can’t find the notes anywhere. Magda hits her head, berating herself for her carelessness.
It is ironic that the record of this long-awaited and dreaded conversation is mysteriously lost. For her whole life, Peter’s war story has been at arm’s length from Magda. It has been this way for so long that Magda has built up a huge amount of pressure around the conversation—fear and excitement are at an all-time high. However, that Magda ultimately is unable to preserve this significant conversation suggests that she was never destined to understand Peter completely. He always was and always would be partially inscrutable to her.
Themes
When Magda gets home from Adelaide, she writes down as much of her and Peter’s conversation as she remembers: Peter talked about radiotherapy treatment, and Magda—feeling an impulse to mother Peter since he’d lost his own mother—comforted him. Peter said that he’d turned to tennis because he had lost his youth. Magda tried to tell Peter that she forgave him for his attitude toward tennis. Peter also said that, during the war, he’d had girlfriends all over and that sex workers had always been kind, offering places to hide.
Peter’s rationalization for his hobbies and behavior indicates the recovery of his youth. He was never able to get beyond the youth that he lost in the war. Incessantly in need of a mother and an identity, Peter’s interests and relationships took on a different meaning than they might otherwise have. In other words, Peter hasn’t been able to fully move on from the war: a person never gets away from what they lost.
Themes
Peter couldn’t stand watching what happened to the Jews; once, Peter saw a German let a little Jewish boy drag a bag of potatoes through a barbed wire fence before picking him up and shooting him. Magda sobbed so hard that her heart pounded; when Peter revealed that he’d shot that German when he’d recognized him later in the war, Magda commended him. Peter said that he is not a hero and is neither proud nor ashamed of his past actions; he’d had a “lust for guns”; at just 15, he’d killed some boys to obtain a coveted German pistol. Magda’s mind then went blank, and she and Peter entered a “traumatic fugue state.”
Peter says that his moral character during the war was ambiguous. This sense of ambiguity—that one is neither a hero nor a coward, and neither proud nor ashamed—creates an attitude of indifference that is startling. Magda has often been terrified by this cold attitude, but here, she falls into the same state along with Peter—a traumatic fugue state where there is nothing to say or feel. This solidarity suggests that Magda empathizes with her father more than she has in the past. It is also evidence that she carries his legacy.
Themes
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During the war, Peter’s job was to assassinate traitors. Using this as an analogy for parenthood, Peter worried that he would have to punish his kids for wrongdoing.
Themes
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