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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
With Barb and Chris busy, Magda looked to The Brady Bunch for perspective on her life. The Bradys had ordinary names and no father with cancer, and survived all moral challenges. Magda also looked to the moon for comfort. She watched shows about space exploration; in 1969, she cried when she watched Neil Armstrong land on the moon. Magda felt that if the moon was reachable then anything was possible.
As a child, Magda desires both normalcy and greatness, which are mutually exclusive. As she grows up, she constantly straddles this divide: her professional success doesn’t satisfy her inner sense of abnormality and loneliness. Ultimately, Magda will have to rectify the divide between her personal and public selves in order to feel fulfilled in her life.
Themes
Magda hated dolls, and was, in all respects, a tomboy. Margaret was uneasy with Magda wanting boys’ toys and clothes. Magda knew she liked girls, but she used images from TV to “normalize” herself; inside, she wanted to kiss Marcia Brady, but tried to make herself look and act like Marcia Brady instead.
Peter loved movies; he could scarcely believe it when his daughter starred alongside Mickey Rooney in Babe: Pig in the City (Magda Szubanski is a film star and comedian). Peter also loved war movies, but he criticized how unbelievable they were. The only actor Peter respected was Audie Murphy, a veteran.
Peter is a harsh critic of the realism of war movies because he does not view extreme violence as entertainment or adventure. Therefore, to Peter, war does not make sense as a spectacle for viewing—it should only ever be a harsh reality, and never a source of entertainment.
Themes
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Once, when a Holocaust documentary came on the TV, Peter pointed out the street where his family had lived. Magda then realized that the pleading Jewish children and piles of bodies were not actors—they were real people. Struggling to reconcile the Hollywood war movies with her father’s real past, Magda looked to Peter; she was shocked by his lack of emotion. Sensing Magda’s fear at seeing the distressing images on the screen, Peter looked back at Magda with contempt. Feeling that a chasm lay between her and her father, Magda vowed never to show fear again. During a game of baseball the next day at recess, Magda swung the bat for the Jews, cursing the Nazis, and hit a homerun.
Magda’s fear and Peter’s inability—or disinclination—to fear fundamentally estrange father and daughter. In this way, the main lesson that Peter learned about survival—that emotions get a person killed—forces him to make sacrifices even after the war has ended, complicating his ability to form human connections. However, from the outside, Magda and Peter are alike in their respective self-isolation: Magda feels isolated by her sexuality, while Peter likely feels isolated by his inability to fear, and therefore to feel.
Themes
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