SOURCE: Matthews, S. Leigh. “‘The Bright Bone of a Dream’: Drama, Performativity, Ritual, and Community in Michael Ondaatje's Running in the Family.” Biography 23, no. 2 (spring 2000): 352-71.

In the following essay, Matthews connects the autobiographical elements of Running in the Family with conventional dramatic techniques in order to demonstrate the work's ritualized “performance” of personal, familial, and community identity.

The part always has a tendency to reunite with its whole in order to escape from its imperfections.

—Leonardo da Vinci

I go back there a lot now and I go back to complete myself, I think.

—Michael Ondaatje, Interview with Ariel Dorfman

Given the popularity of performance theory in modern day academic circles, and the open-ended definition of the word “performance” provided by such theorists as Richard Schechner,¹ it is inevitable that the long-accepted analogy of “life as theatre” would be extended to that particular literary genre known as...