Running part 2

After reading this second section of Running in the Family, I feel like a change in the style of writing took place. The first section seemed to be more about stories about his relatives that had been past through his family. Often these stories were humorous and entertaining. However in this second section, it seemed to me that Ondaatje really changed the direction of where this book was going. Some of these chapters had him in it, but we still didn’t find out anything about him. To me this is becoming a little bit frustrating. I still do not know anything about him, and we are already halfway through the book. Also I thought that the random poems contained through out these chapters were kind of strange. I think it took away from the message and the flow of the book in my opinion. Maybe if you enjoy poetry and analyzing it this would probably add to the effect of the whole thing. As for me, I really do not enjoy reading poetry, and especially do not like analyzing it. So I found these poems to be boring and a distraction from the book.

The one chapter that I did really enjoy was the last one of the section. I thought that it shed light on to what was happening in the country. It talked about the child soldiers and how they were attempting to take over the country. This showed me why he probably left the country in the first place. Apparently there was a lot of turmoil going on and his parents probably wanted to get him out of Sri Lanka, and make sure he did not join the child army. This part of the book made me stop and think how lucky we all are to live in America. We do not have to worry about these threats to our security and way of life. Overall I hope the book starts to back track to the original style of the first section.