An explanation as to why Ondaatje uses this style of writing to help readers in understanding his family history is because in a way, it helps him understand his own history. By fictionalizing and elaborating truths, Ondaatje convinces himself and readers that the historic, social, and climatic details explored in this book are integral parts of his life and as good as the truth. However, there is a certain tension that can be seen in this book, as it starts from being a novel solely to satisfy the author’s curiosity, when he gets aggravated that he cannot even recall his family’s history. This is shown in a conversation between him and a friend at the start of the memoir; “I tried to communicate some of the fragments I knew about my father, my grandmother. ‘So how did your grandmother die?’ ‘Natural causes.’ ‘What?’ ‘Floods.’ And then another wave of the party swirled me away.” Ondaatje wishes to reunite with his family, but also wants to keep them at a distance in order to be able to penetrate his family’s history and view it from different angles. The effect of this is simple; to get a broader understanding of the true nature of his family and events that shaped his family.
Ondaatje begins his fictionalized memoir with a third person narrative:
He snaps on the electricity just before daybreak. For twenty five years he has not lived in this country, though up to the age of eleven he slept in rooms like this-with no curtains, just delicate bars across the windows so no one could break in. And the floors of red cement polished smooth, cool against bare feet.
Dawn through a garden. Clarity to leaves, fruit, the dark yellow of King Coconut. This delicate light is allowed only a brief moment of the day. In ten minutes the garden will lie in a blaze of heat, frantic with noise and butterflies.
Half a page-and the morning is already ancient.
Before any other information is known to the readers beyond that this book is a fictionalized memoir, Ondaatje chooses to paint a picture with these words on pg. 17. In essence, Ondaatje is attempting to set a nostalgic mood from the very beginning and keeps referring to this painted picture all throughout the rest of the book.
A faded photograph and a sentence later the narrator uses first person narrative, and enters the next chapter to announce that "What began it all was the bright bone of a dream I could barely hold onto." Ondaatje’ uses first person narrative to show that it is in fact HIM that is the exile and it is this that is the exile’s dream of return to a place called Ceylon which is vaguely-remembered but vividly imagined. Ondaatje uses a third-person narrative at the start to show the longing for knowledge of his past, something that is now just a fading memory. The photographs help to show concrete proof in the middle of gossips and twisted truths. The fading of the photographs enhance the impersonal idea that Sri Lanka, in the mind of Ondaatje is simply a place that he recalls living. The place, to which Ondaatje tries desperately to return, a fiction called Ceylon, appears to have no present in Ondaatje’s mind but is built up in layers of memories piled upon memories. Ondaatje begins to define the boundaries of his search by creating his own reality, his own genres to satisfy his curiosity by employing his own words to describe events.
Another reason that this novel is individual is because it includes poetry in the middle of a memoir of self-discovery. Poetry combined with prose, which is simply ordinary writing, without mechanical structure. There are several effects of this. On pg. 76, a Ceylonese poet is cited, “to our remote / villages the painters come, and our white-washed / mud-huts were splattered with gunfire.” Ondaatje treats his family’s history quite ironically and therefore undermines it since Ondaatje’s ancestors were in fact Dutch and came to Sri Lanka. It is ironic because the “painters” referred to in this poem are symbolizing foreigners in general, including Ondaatje. This enhances the third culture aspect of his Ceylon. Even though this poem is ironic as it is somewhat mocking Ondaatje himself, the author puts it in the middle of this book about self-discovery because all throughout the book his ancestors seem to be criticizing foreigners who invade Ceylon. By placing this poem in the book after the prose, it shows that Ondaatje is both the outsider and the insider. The poems seem to show a voice, an exile’s voice that is both marginal and central, when he states “I am the foreigner. I am the prodigal who hates the foreigner.” The poems help Ondaatje in stepping back from all the complaints about foreigners disintegrating the society and realize it’s these foreigners; himself, his family, that incorporate together to make Sri Lanka the rich, third culturally enhanced society that it is. On pg. 85, Ondaatje speaks of the Europeans “Don’t talk to be about Matisse…/ the European style of 1900, the tradition of the studio / where the nude woman reclines forever / on a sheet of blood.” From the following pg, Ondaatje’s collections of poems start. The effect of this is to show the juxtaposition between Europe having no diversity in cultures and the poems which aim to elaborate on the affluent culture of Ceylon. Ondaatje shows that culture is all about its traditions when he states on in the poem “High Flowers,” “The shape of knife and pot / do not vary from 18th century museum prints.” The result of combining poetry and prose is to show that the interrelationships between the different cultural identities that formed the country through foreigners are still present. Poetry has the ability to do things that prose cannot; for example it’s emotive and is placed in this memoir solely to show Ondaatje’s emotions concerning his family, the status of women, and the riches of Ceylon itself. Ondaatje’s use of photographs, which are very much genuine, depicting real people, but they are in this memoir so Ondaatje can show that they are still very much contrived and artificial. There is a picture of his parents making faces at each other on pg. 163 and another on pg. 102 where numerous family members are dressed in carnival clothes. These pictures illustrate that although the people, the time, the moment is real, their actions and behavior in that moment are not, they are being actors as seen in the parent photo or being different characters, all unknown to one another, despite that they are all from the same family.
The Monsoon Notebooks in this book show the style of writing known as “Stream of Consciousness,” which is simply direct writing from the brain. This style of writing helps in dealing with Ondaatje’s various internal and external conflicts without any regard to logic or argument. The effect of the monsoon notebooks are a sense of how rich Ceylon is, culturally and environmentally and the nostalgic mood of forgetting all these things during his childhood which is shown through Ondaatje’s writing when he states, “One morning I would wake and just smell things for the whole day, it was so rich I had to select senses.” The stream of consciousness in the Monsoon Notebooks expose Ondaatje’s inner conflict of not witnessing events while growing up and only to return to them when they are a vague bundle of gossips and scandals. They are written in this style to show that Ondaatje is sitting down to write the very text being read and putting himself and the reader in a certain place and time and bringing himself closer to his book and audience. And by doing that, it is easier for the reader to relate the book to Ondaatje, which is further compounded by occasional first person speech within the stories of his book and more so in the reactions he gives to them. The stream of consciousness technique helps in showing the chaotic nature of the entire memoir and shows how impossible it is to record thoughts coherently.
