The English Patient

Hana and Caravaggio go out for a walk at night. He lets her change the bandages on his hands, and he tells her how he was tortured. The Germans caught him jumping from a woman's window and then brought him in, handcuffed him to a table, and cut off his thumbs. When Hana and Caravaggio get back to the house, the English patient sees Caravaggio and is stunned.

Hana decides to play the old piano in the library. Outside, it is pouring rain, and two soldiers slip into the library, at first unnoticed by Hana. With their guns, they come up to the piano and listen to her play. When Caravaggio returns, he finds Hana and the soldiers making sandwiches together in the kitchen.

Analysis

One major theme of The English Patient is the way the war transforms the individuals who are involved in it. All the characters that have been introduced thus far have been entirely altered by the war. Caravaggio, a former thief, has lost not only his thumbs, but also much of his youth and his . He can no longer steal, nor can he live any kind of happy life. He finds himself envious of those "whole" men he sees, men who can live independently and without pity. The English patient has likewise been visibly transformed by the war. Having literally lost his entire identity, he is alive only to reflect on the life he once had. Hana, too, has been irrevocably altered by her wartime experience. After having a near-breakdown, Hana stands on the cusp of adulthood, unsure whether to take charge of her life or to hide and look for shelter like a child. She chooses to postpone her decision, remaining in a villa and caring for a burned man. The war has taken a piece of each character's identity, replacing it with a scar that each now bears.

An important and recurring symbol in the novel is the Italian villa in which Hana and the English patient live. Ondaatje writes, "there seemed little demarcation between house and landscape, between damaged building and the burned and shelled remnants of the earth." Such an organic image is symbolically important to the novel. Straddling the line between house and landscape, building and earth, the villa represents both death and rebirth. War has destroyed the villa, making huge holes in walls and ceilings. Nature has returned to fill these holes, however, replacing absence with life. Such an image mirrors the spiritual death and rebirth of the villa's inhabitants.

Chapter III

Summary

One of the soldiers who has entered the library while  plays the piano is a young sikh, an Indian officer who works with the British forces to clear unexploded bombs and mines. He has run into the library out of fear for the piano player, as Germans often hid bombs in musical instruments and metronomes.  finds the piano safe and then makes camp in the garden of . He makes it his duty to clear the area and make it safe for the inhabitants. Hana notices that the sikh is always extraordinarily respectful and polite. She watches his muscles and notices the unashamed physicality of his body.

The sikh is sent on very dangerous and sensitive missions. He must protect the Italian people at their ceremonies honoring the Virgin Mary, and even look for bombs on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Although the sikh does not share these people's faith, he does everything he can to protect it.

Hana and  talk. She tells him that she was pregnant and used to talk to the baby all the time, but lost the baby in an abortion when she got to Sicily, as the baby's father was dead anyway. Hana tells Caravaggio all she has learned about death in her work as a nurse. She tells him that, after a while, she refused to have anything to do with the soldiers on a personal level. She withdrew emotionally and threw herself into her work.

The sikh, named Kip, goes into 's room to talk to him one day. It turns out that they get along very well, and they are able to spend much time talking of their expertise on bombs, guns, and weapons. Hana is glad that her patient has found a new friend.

The narrator tells the story of how the English patient got to Italy. The Bedouin tribe that saved him brought him to the British base at Siwa in 1944. He was moved from the Western desert to Tunis, then shipped to Italy. Because he could not be identified, and could hardly remember who he was, the British had a very difficult time trying to determine whether or not he was an enemy. He seemed very British and bombarded them with facts about Italy, the military, and history. His rambling drove them crazy, but they were never quite sure who he was. As the English patient tells Hana the story, he drifts off to sleep. She reads parts of his journal.

One day, Kip is searching the garden and he finds a large and complicated bomb with wires running through the grass and attached to a tree. He needs Hana's help to hold one of the wires while he tries to figure out which one to cut. He succeeds in neutralizing , but it has been particularly difficult and he is shaking. Hana tells him that she is not afraid of death, and that she just wishes she could curl up in his arms and feel safe here on the grass. While they are curled up and Hana is sleeping, Kip feels preoccupied. He knows that his brown skin will always make him a foreigner, unable to let his guard down and have real human contact.

That night, the four have a party in the English patient's room. Caravaggio has found a gramophone and he puts on music to dance with Hana. While they celebrate, Kip hears an explosion. He lies and tells them that it was not the explosion of a mine, but when he gets a chance, he runs down to the site of the explosion. He locates the dead and buries his second-in-command, Hardy. Kip is reminded of how dangerous his job is and is angered that Hana had treated her own life so casually that morning. He returns to the villa and finds Hana sitting by the side of the patient's bed, his hearing aid turned up to its highest volume. Kip thinks that he will be sane if he can just touch Hana. He cuts the wire of the patient's hearing aid, promising to rewire it in the morning, and touches Hana's shoulder.

The next morning, Hana, Kip, and Caravaggio are talking outside. Caravaggio wonders if it is possible for a person to be in love with someone who is not any smarter than that person. He is frustrated with Hana because she is so in love with her English patient that she refuses to do the reasonable thing and leave Italy to save herself. Caravaggio says that she and Kip should get out of this dangerous place and go off and have babies together. Hana begins to feel uncomfortable in the company of the three men now that physical attraction is palpably present. All she would like to do is lay with Kip and have him protect her.

At night, Hana sneaks across the garden into Kip's tent and they become lovers. She is very attracted to him and to the dark color of his skin. She knows that neither of them is beholden to the other. It is merely their choice to be together for the moment. Hana becomes annoyed sometimes at Kip's self- sufficiency, the way he is able to shut out the world around him. Nonetheless, she enjoys spending the night with him, lying under his protection.

Analysis

In Chapter III, Ondaatje explores the nature of love and shows how it can surface even in the middle of war. Caravaggio charges that Hana is in love with the English patient, reasoning that she is drawn to the patient because he is so smart and mysterious. What Caravaggio does not see is that Hana needs the patient as much as he needs her. Although it seems that the patient ties Hana to an unsafe place, she sees him as freeing her from the awful horrors of war. She feels she can once again become emotionally attached to someone, and that she can finally let down her guard.

The love Hana feels for Kip is of a different kind. Kip becomes her protector, a strong, healthy male figure to save her from dangers. Ondaatje writes that when Hana is with Kip, she feels "her tongue instead of a swab, her tooth instead of a needle, her mouth instead of the mask with the codeine drops to make him sleep." To Kip, Hana is not a nurse, but a woman, and this withdrawal from her professional duty is refreshing to her. Kip, on the other hand, finds in Hana a link to sanity, someone who is young and alive. Facing death every day, Kip is forced to come to grips with is own mortality, yet Hana links him to life. The love that emerges, therefore, is one based on mutual needs and the search for fulfillment of those needs during the stress of wartime.

Chapter IV

Summary

The chapter opens with a brief discussion of the western world's history of involvement in the desert. Since Herodotus in 425 B.C., there has been little interest in the desert save for those old geographers who make it their business to explore the world and return to London to give talks at meetings of the Geographical Society. By the mid-1930s, there is a resurgence of desert exploration, and then in 1939 the desert becomes another theater of the war.

As  sits by his bed,  tells her how he was a part of an "oasis society," a small group of Europeans who mapped and explored the desert. They worked independently, but the desert Europeans knew all about each other. They would meet occasionally between their adventures and explorations. In 1930, he went on his first journey. It was only meant to last seven days, but the sandstorms were so severe that they lost all of their animals and supplies. If they had not kept moving they would have been buried alive by the sand.

The English patient had continued to travel across the desert throughout the 1930s, occasionally meeting another Europeans but spending almost all of his time with the Bedouin people. He came to hate the idea of nations and nationalities, feeling that such concepts were superficial and caused only destruction. The desert rejected such labels and nationalities. Though some of the European explorers tried to place their names on the things they found, the English patient wanted to disappear. He wanted to lose himself completely and not belong to any person or any nation.

The patient talks about how he wanted to remain in one particular oasis, among the acacia trees forever. It was a place where populations had existed over the centuries and then had disappeared entirely, coming and going with the water. He compares a lover to water, the life force that one needs in the desert. Hana wonders who this woman is who has been the great love of her patient's life.

The patient tells Hana that in 1936 a young man named  had heard about his expedition from a friend at Oxford. Within two weeks, Clifton had gotten married to a woman named  and flown with his new wife to join their party in Cairo. The party, which had consisted of four explorers—Prince Kemal el Dein, Bell, Almásy, and Madox—was focused on finding the ancient city of Zerzura, nestled in the Gilf Kebir, a plateau in the Libyan desert. Clifton was wealthy and had his own plane, a convenience that would make their search much easier.

The party was initially surprised that Clifton had brought his wife, but the patient says he thinks they accepted her politely enough. There seemed to be a large culture gap between the Cliftons and the explorers. The patient's entire life revolved around things that could not be valued in a material society—history, latitudes, and events that took place hundreds of years ago. One night, as they all sat at the campfire, Katharine recited poetry to them. That was the moment that the English patient had fallen in love with a voice.

The patient adds that adultery is something that was never included in the minutes of the Geographical Society. Theirs was a love that was left out of the detailed reports.

Analysis

Starting the chapter with history by Herodotus and threading quotes by the historian throughout the novel, Ondaatje connects the past with the present. Indeed, the past is of utmost importance in The English Patient. The past is the only thing the patient has left in his life. Even before his injury however, he had always been aware of the past and connected to it. He chose his profession because he knew that money and power are fleeting, just as civilizations are. He wanted to immerse himself in something greater, something that was immortal, and he found that in the desert.

Time in the novel is extraordinarily fluid, as days blend into weeks and overlap with memories and past centuries. Ondaatje employs this fluidity of time as a device to encourage connections in our minds as we read the novel. Situations past and present are interrelated and are used to inform each other. The illicit nature of the patient's love affair is mirrored in Hana's relationship with . Past and present intertwine to create a larger picture of love in war.

The desert itself functions like a character in the novel. It is a living entity that has the power to kill, to bury, and to alter lives. Ondaatje writes that it "could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names long before Canterbury existed." In this way, the desert extends beyond time, connecting people across ages with a shared experience. The patient has used the desert to lose himself, to shed his . As a setting for a love story, the desert is an empty and barren place, which helps us focus on the intensity of personal connections that take place there. At once harsh and beautiful, the desert acts as an intensifier, heightening the drama and the tragedy in human relationships.

Chapter V

Summary

 first dreamed of the man who would become  several days after she met him. She woke up screaming as if from a nightmare and  brought her a glass of water. In her dream she had felt the man's anger toward her, his frustration that a married woman was among them. In her dream he had "yoked her neck back so that she had been unable to breathe within her arousal." Most of what she felt toward him was sexual. While he rambled, she longed to slap him, though she listened politely. She had plenty of time to study him, this man who had years earlier left normal life for the world of the desert.

The man angers Katharine with his assumptions and his excessive politeness. Nonetheless they begin a love affair and soon cannot bear to be apart from one another, sneaking private moments in plum gardens, crowded markets, and offices. She is confused about what to do, as she hates a lie but knows that Geoffrey will go mad if she tells him about her affair. Katharine takes her frustration out on the English patient, making various colors of bruises on his skin with her blows, throwing plates at his head, and stabbing forks into his shoulder. He makes up silly excuses for his wounds, and people start to think he is quite accident-prone.

The love affair is tumultuous. The man, who has never felt alone even in the desert, cannot bear to be without Katharine. He wishes to "burn down all social rules, all courtesy" to get to her. He knows that they are "sinners in a holy city" but does not care, as long as he can remain with her. In public, she builds a wall between them, refusing even to look at him or acknowledge him. This drives him mad, but he knows Katharine does it for her own protection, as he has protected himself emotionally from the outside world for so long. He tries to work but he can hardly write. He goes insane if he is not with her, and he cannot accept losing her.

One night, the twenty-eighth of September, Katharine decides she cannot compromise, and insists that they be apart. She tells the man that they can never see each other again, as her husband, Geoffrey, will go mad if he finds out. The man brings Katharine home, unsure whether Geoffrey is inside. He tells her he does not miss her yet, but she says that he will. He feels he has fallen in love and been disassembled.

Analysis

Chapter V is like the other chapters in that it is not chronological, but is unlike some of the others in that it has a unifying theme: the English patient's passion for Katharine. Their love, which begins as purely physical, quickly progresses to something much deeper. This conflation of the physical body with the emotional existence is a recurring idea in the novel. The English patient's connection to Katharine  the physical, and he feels insane when he is not with her. She is so constantly in his thoughts that he is unable even to work. Her emotional and psychological presence becomes so foremost in his mind that he is shocked to be brought back to reality with a reminder of physicality—a vaccination scar on her arm. Ondaatje perhaps mentions the otherwise insignificant scar to highlight the physical and emotional depth of Katharine's relationship with the English patient.

The physical wounds the English patient endures at Katharine's hand are also significant. Her abuse of him suggests that love and hate are closely intertwined emotions. When two people who have been extremely accustomed to existing alone suddenly connect, abandoning their self-sufficient worlds, they find it shocking and upsetting to discover their reciprocal need for another person. Katharine especially struggles because this person she has discovered a need for does not fit nicely or neatly into her life. This is what Katharine discovers, and she hates her lover for it. What emerges from this chapter is an overriding sense of extreme, even uncontrollable passion. Ondaatje portrays a passion for which the characters would sacrifice their entire existence.

Chapter VI

Summary

 flashes back to another of his memories, describing the time in Cairo when he was in love with . One day he asks his friend  what the spot in the front, right at the base of a woman's neck, is called. Madox tells him to pull himself together.

 tells  that he thinks the English patient is not really English. He thinks he is a Hungarian man named Almásy who worked for the Germans during the war. Almásy had been a desert explorer throughout the 1930s. He knew all about the desert and its dialects, and when the war broke out, became a guide for spies, taking them across the desert into Cairo. Caravaggio thinks the patient is Almásy because one night the patient suggested some very peculiar names for the dog—names only Almásy would know. Hana sticks to her opinion that the patient is an Englishman.

Caravaggio continues, telling Hana the whole story of the Hungarian man. Almásy had helped the German spy Eppler get across the desert. Eppler was an extremely important man, as he delivered coded messages directly to General Rommel through a code hidden in a copy of the novel Rebecca. Almásy was known for both being able to fly planes and being able to sound English. He was educated in England and in Cairo he was even known as "the English spy." Caravaggio is almost certain that the English patient is Almásy.

Since being wounded, Caravaggio has become a morphine addict. Hana noticed that he found and raided her supply of medicinal morphine as soon as he got there. Now Caravaggio wants to give her English patient a Brompton cocktail—morphine and alcohol—to get him talking. Hana is concerned and thinks Caravaggio is too obsessed with her patient's past. She figures that it does not matter what side he was on now that the war is over. Hana tells her patient that Caravaggio thinks he is not English. She also tells him that Caravaggio was a thief, albeit an unsuccessful one, in Canada.

After the Brompton cocktail, the English patient talks freely about the events that led up to his plane crash. He tells Caravaggio exactly where he was in the desert, having just left the Gilf Kebir. Driving through the desert, his truck exploded. He assumed it had been sabotaged by one of the Bedouins, as there were spies from both sides among them. Escaping the explosion, he set out in the direction of a plane he knew was buried at one location in the desert. After four nights of walking, he arrived at Ain Dua, where the plane was buried. There, he cooled himself in the waters of the well and entered the cave where Katharine remained. He had promised to return to her. He found her in a corner wrapped in parachute material, dead. He approached her, as a lover does, and made love to her dead body. He then carried her out into the sun, dressed, and brought her to the plane.

Katharine had been in the cave for three years. In 1939, she was injured when her husband  attempted a murder-suicide with his plane. Geoffrey had somehow found out about their affair and intended to kill all three of them in one moment. He was supposed to pick up the English patient in the desert at an appointed time. He arrived, but was flying erratically. He landed not fifty yards away from the English patient, intending to crash into him and kill all three at once. But the English patient was unhurt and Katharine was only injured by the crash. Still, she was too weak to walk across the desert, so he carried her to the cave to wait for him. He left his copy of Herodotus with her. He promised to come back for her and take her to safety. Three years later, he did.

The English patient flashes back to the events leading up to the fateful plane crash that injured Katharine. It was during their months of separation, when Katharine insisted that they not see each other anymore, that the English patient became bitter. He could not bear that she would not see him, and he became determined that she had taken another lover. Her last endearments to him seemed false, and he trusted nothing. In his copy of Herodotus he wrote down all her arguments against him, wanting to record them so he might remember and believe them. It was the patient's meanness to Katharine that made Geoffrey suspect that he was her lover.

While he was carrying Katharine's injured body from the plane to the cave, they had a few moments to talk. She told him that he killed everything in her during their separation. She said that she left him not only because her husband was mad, but because she knew she could never change him. He would not reveal one more inch of his character to her, and she felt isolated.

Three years after he had this conversation with her, he came back to find her dead body. He dug up the buried plane, for which he had brought fuel, and placed her inside it. They took off in the plane and flew a small distance when the plane begins to fall apart. Oil poured over his knees as the bottom of the plane brushed the trees. There was a spark and the whole plane caught fire. He parachuted down to the ground, and only then did he realize that his entire body was on fire.

Back in the present, the English patient talks to . They share a can of condensed milk, which the English patient greatly enjoys. He tells Kip that they get along so well because they are both "international bastards," born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Kip thinks of all the teachers he lost, his English mentors. He is emotionally withdrawn.

Analysis

In The English Patient, there is no single narrator, as each of the main characters has a voice at one time or another. The point of view shifts from one character to another, sometimes within the same chapter, offering descriptions of a single event from multiple perspectives. The critic Lorraine York points to the evening of Hana's birthday to illustrate this "complicated dance of gazes." On this evening, Caravaggio watches Hana's legs as she walks: "her legs and thighs moved through the skirt of her frock as if it were thin water." Then, from Kip's point of view: "Hana moved alongside them, her hands in her pockets, the way Kip loved to see her walk." This change of perspectives adds depth to the narrative, emphasizing the presence of multiple realities and various points of view within a scene. There is no one character who is the only watcher, or other characters who are the only ones watched. Each character watches in his or her own right, taking in sensory experiences and mixing them with memories. Ondaatje's use of this technique makes the narrative a complete tale, rejecting the idea that there is only one story to be told.

Chapter VII

Summary

 remembers his training for  squad in 1940 in Westbury, England, under the direction of , his mentor. As the second son in his family, Kip was expected to be a doctor, but the war changed all that. He volunteered for the army and ended up in the bomb unit. The work was extremely dangerous and the life expectancy was only about ten weeks. Once the Germans began bombing Britain, there were suddenly nearly 3,700 unexploded bombs in the country, ready to be tripped by unwitting people. It was Kip's job to help clear all these bombs away.

Kip greatly admired Lord Suffolk, and thought he represented the best of the English. Suffolk would tell Kip of English culture and customs just as if he were an Englishman himself, not a foreigner visiting their country. Suffolk was full of anecdotes and information, and taught Kip about western life. When Kip had first applied for the position as part of the bomb detonation unit, he was worried he would be denied because of his race. However, Suffolk and his secretary, Miss Morden, told him he had completed the problems so well and had such a good character, that they were sure they would offer him the job. Kip found himself welcomed into a little family of which he was glad to be a part. His skill and character won him a position of individuality, free of the "chaotic machinery" of the army. Living in the unit with Suffolk, he began to love the English and their ways.

Kip tells  about the moment he learned that Lord Suffolk, Miss Morden, and four men in training were killed. He was in London working on a bomb when an officer came to tell him the news that they had all been killed when Suffolk was attempting to dismantle a 25-kilogram bomb. Kip was unbearably upset, but held himself together and pretended they were all still alive. The officer came to tell him there was another bomb, just like the one that killed Suffolk, and it needed to be taken care of immediately.

Kip went to attempt to dismantle the bomb, though it was the middle of the night and he was exhausted. He knew the Germans must have changed the way they put the bomb together. To figure out the secret, one had to understand not only the bomb-maker's mind, but also his character. Kip was excellent at figuring out both.

When Kip got to the bomb, the area was ablaze with the officers' lights. Kip examined the bomb and realized that he could dismantle it from its explosive material, making it essentially harmless. Once he did this, he set to work on figuring out the "joke" to the bomb. Eventually he realized it: the Germans had put a second gaine, a whole separate device into the bomb to make it very difficult to defuse. Once Kip realized this, he also had to accept that Lord Suffolk and his English friends were dead. Kip now carried the responsibility of defusing all the bombs of this type and teaching all the other sappers in England how to do so. He had not realized Suffolk's responsibility until that point. Such responsibility trained Kip to block out everything else whenever he is working on a bomb, and to realize what a terrible weight rests on him.

Kip figured out the new bomb that night. The second fuse was set to detonate exactly an hour after the first, long after a sapper would have assumed the bomb was safe. Kip wrote out detailed diagrams and explanations of the new bomb, and looking at the problem from another angle, was able to come up with a method of defusing that would completely change the way bombs were handled in England.

Kip was uncomfortable with the respect his skill earned him among the ranks of men. Because of his race, he was used to being anonymous and invisible in England, and he was comfortable with that. He chose to leave his duty in England and travel on ship with a hundred other sappers to Italy, where he could be comfortable with his invisibility once more. Kip had built up emotional defenses in England, and it was not so easy for him to take them down.

Kip remembers his family at home. His brother had been the one who courted confrontation, who refused to give into anything that implied English domination. Kip's brother was put in prison and remained there for a long time. Though Kip admired his brother, he knew he would be different, as he hated confrontation and searched for effective means around it. Kip would stand still, invisible, until he was allowed to do whatever he wanted. He joined the army in his brother's place. His brother was not upset, and was confident that Kip possessed the trick of survival.

The chapter closes with Kip remembering his sapper test, the time Lord Suffolk watched him as he defused a bomb on the famous chalk horses on the hills of Westbury. Miss Morden had been so nice to him, bringing him refreshments without fear of her own safety. But now she was gone.

Analysis

Through Kip, Ondaatje further explores the idea of  and the quality of being "nationless."  tells Kip that the two of them get along so well because they are both "international bastards"—men born in one place who choose to live in another. Unlike his brother, Kip embraces the western world, and especially the English. He sings Western music, wears Western clothes, and makes it his job to defuse bombs in order to save English lives. Far from being "nationless," Kip has strongly attached himself to the English nation, and knows he could never imagine doing the same job for the Germans.

Much of Kip's goodwill toward the English emerges from his experience with Lord Suffolk and his staff. Suffolk is astute enough to recognize Kip's skill and character, and thus not only trains him in bomb defusing, but also welcomes him into the "family," even taking him to see Peter Pan when he wanted to. Kip is touched by the fact that this "true English gentleman" would look past his race and take him under his wing. It becomes evident that Kip feels closer to his English family than to his Indian one. Though he talks sadly about his mentor Lord Suffolk and his premature demise, he seems relatively nonchalant about the fate of his Indian family. When Hana asks if Kip's father is still alive, he replies as if it is not much concern to him: "Oh, yes. I think. I've not had letters for some time. And it is likely that my brother is still in jail."

Kip's experience highlights the fallacy of being "nationless." Though he is born of a different nation—albeit part of the British empire—Kip finds a nation to which he attaches himself both in nature and in action. Such an understanding of Kip's connection to a nation sheds light on the English patient's connection to his own nation, as the patient himself invites this comparison. The patient has left his European home and joined the nation that is the desert. There, like Kip, he has found his skills were most useful, and feels able to erase his past so that he may be known and valued for what he has to offer the people of his new nation, the desert. Escaping one's nation, then, becomes a larger metaphor for escaping one's past, and creating a new identity: one that is based on personal character.

Chapter VIII

Summary

 brings a ladybird for  to give to . The ladybird clutches the patient's dark skin. In the library,  accidentally nudges a fuse box off a counter. Kip's body slides under it, saving them from the explosion that would have resulted. Kip knows he has made an impression on Caravaggio, and knows that one day, the thief will be kind to an East Indian in return and will think of Kip. Caravaggio tells a story about one of his burglaries that was foiled by a family of Indians. Hana partly believes this story, as she remembers that Caravaggio "was constantly diverted by the human element during burglaries."

Kip remembers a time in 1941 when he was lowered into a pit to defuse a giant Esau bomb. He was very cold, nearly twenty feet down a pit in muddy water with little sunlight to warm him. His fingers were so cold that they lost their agility and became almost useless. His body was so close to  that he could feel the temperature changes. He describes in detail how he first tried to defuse the bomb, made a mistake, and then finally succeeded in neutralizing it. They pulled him out of the pit after the bomb was dead, and his body was almost frozen from the liquid oxygen he spilled onto himself in his first attempts. When he got out of the pit, he realized there was a crowd around, far too close to the bomb. They would have been destroyed if the bomb had exploded. But all Kip could think about was how he was not frightened in the pit, just angry at his mistake. Only Hardy, his next in command, still kept him human.

Hana and Kip sit out in the sun after Kip washes his long hair. She enjoys gazing at his body and imagining his quiet civilization. He tells her how his brother thinks he is foolish for trusting the English. His brother believes that Asia is not a free continent and the English will never give any credit to the Sikhs for their help in the war. On this point, Kip disagrees with his brother. Hana thinks that at night, when Kip lets down his hair, "he is once more in another constellation."

Kip never moves independently, but always in relation to things: his eyes are always observant, searching for something dangerous. He will never take a moment to consider himself, because he is the only thing that is certainly safe. Though he can describe Hana's clavicle and the shape of her shoulder, he would find it difficult to remember the color of her eyes. He only sees what he needs to see. He spends time with the English patient because he realizes that, though sick, the creature inside is noble, and has a memory that reaches far deeper than any of the others'.

The four in  are accustomed to rising at daybreak and eating dinner with the last available light. Late one night, long after Hana has blown out the candle in the English patient's room, she and Kip sneak into the villa from two different doors. This is a game they have arranged to play. It is completely dark, and Kip sneaks through the kitchen into the enclosed courtyard to hide in a well, waiting for Hana. He has swept the library for mines for a week, so he knows that this room, at least, is completely safe. Hana enters the library with a small light on her arm. She goes to look for one of the few English books among the many Italian ones. She finds what she is looking for and lies down on the couch to read the book. She can hear Caravaggio's wheeze, as he is lying on the floor at the other end of the library. Caravaggio knows Hana is there. He thinks how much more he loves her now that she is an adult. When she was little, he used to wonder what she would be like, but now he knows that she has consciously decided how her life will be shaped, and he feels happy to be a part of that.

Kip, from his vantage point at the well, also sees Hana lying on the couch. All at once, everything seems to be in movement. Caravaggio walks over to the couch and reaches down to touch Hana, but she is not there. He feels an arm close around his neck and he realizes Kip has him in a grip from which he cannot escape. He hears Hana's voice saying "got you, got you." This is all part of their game. Hana has used him as a decoy in her game with Kip. Caravaggio leaves the room, and Kip and Hana make love in the dark.

Kip and Hana feel there are greater forces than sex working between them. As she scratches his back when they are falling asleep, he is reminded of the comforting love of his mother.

Analysis

Chapter VIII highlights the differences between Kip and Caravaggio. Caravaggio, though a thief, is morally and emotionally complex. Far from perfect at his profession, Hana remembers him being "constantly diverted by the human element during burglaries. ...Breaking into a house during Christmas, he would become annoyed if he noticed the Advent calendar had not been opened up to the date to which it should have been." Such a diversion signals fallibility in Caravaggio, and his remarkably human actions give us the sense that even though he is a thief, he may not necessarily be immoral. In contrast, Kip's profession in the army is a noble one. He saves innocent lives every day by defusing bombs, a duty that neutralizes aggression. As a character, however, Kip is not gripped by the same humanizing diversions that occupy Caravaggio. While he is working on a bomb he completely puts aside the human element of his work. He does not give a thought to his feelings or emotions, but only to the task at hand. He repeatedly thinks that he needs either Hardy or Hana to "bring him back to humanity."

This contrast between Kip and Caravaggio emphasizes the nature of humanity in wartime. Because the characters find it is so necessary to protect themselves emotionally, they find it easy to sacrifice humanity. Kip sections off his humanity, seemingly saving it until after the war by placing a wall between himself and everyone else. The English patient also does this throughout the 1930s, refusing to let anyone get close to him in his travels, his affairs, and his friendships. He shares little about his private life, choosing to stick to only the descriptive facts when he writes about the landscape and the geography. This detachment is what makes 's entrance into his life so disruptive to him. She forces humanity and fallibility into his life. In the end, Ondaatje offers no judgment on the characters' varying approaches to the question of humanity, as both Kip and Almasy are left with only the consequences of their decisions.

Chapter IX

Summary

 talks about "how one falls in love." He tells about the first time he ever saw , as she was emerging from a plane. She was too eager for his taste, and her husband , still in the flush of honeymoon, could not stop singing the praises of his new wife. After a month in Cairo, Katharine was more muted,  constantly, but her husband was still young and excited. The English patient was fifteen years older than Katharine, and cynical about everlasting love. She was hungry for change, however: she learned everything she could read about the desert, and she grew up quickly.

Geoffrey's praise meant very little to Katharine, but she was charmed by the English patient's nuance. When she asked if she could read his Herodotus, he gracefully declined to give it to her, as his notes were in it. But he promised to show it to her when he returned from his journey. When he did return from the journey, which had been successful, Geoffrey threw a party for him. Before the party, he loaned Katharine his Herodotus to read as she pleased.

At the party, Katharine chose to read a famous story from Herodotus, but one the English patient usually skips over. It was the story of a very beautiful queen whose husband, the king, praised her beauty all the time. The king was telling a man named Gyges of his wife's beauty, but she was so beautiful that the king wanted Gyges to see for himself. So he arranged for Gyges to sneak into her room and hide in order to watch her while she undressed. The queen saw Gyges sneak out of her room and realized what her husband had done. The next day, she called for Gyges and offered him one of two options: either to slay his friend the king and thus possess her and the kingdom, or to stand there and be slain immediately. Gyges kills the king and reigns with the queen for twenty-eight years. After Katharine finishes this anecdote, which seems quite human and familiar, the English patient realizes he is in love with her.

In the months that followed, the patient and Katharine would be in the same company frequently, as they traveled in similar circles. She and Geoffrey were stationed in Cairo and moving in the circles of the city's society. The pateient would go to events just to see her, and could think of little besides her body, which became the inspiration for one of his books. Naturally, he grew more formal around her, as he did not want her to know of his secret thoughts. One day, at a formal garden party, Katharine came to him and said simply, "I want you to ravish me." After that, the English patient became her lover, and they would steal glances and touches everywhere. The only person they had to avoid was Geoffrey. However, Geoffrey was enmeshed in the circle of British aristocracy, and had a strong web of relations who watched out for him and would let him know if they ever found out about his young wife's infidelity.

Katharine became frustrated at what she called the patient's "inhumanity," his hatred of ownership, of , of being owned. She needed words to convince her that she was special to him, but he had none for her. She decided to leave him and go back to her husband.

The English patient remembers , his best friend in the desert for ten years. Madox could describe his love of the desert in words, whereas the patient could only write factually about the environment around him. The two friends were different in many ways. Madox, for one thing, was entirely faithful to his wife in England. The English patient never knew for certain whether Madox knew about his relationship with Katharine, but he suspected he did. When Madox returned to England at the start of the war in 1939, he and his wife went to church, where they heard a very jingoistic sermon from the priest in support of the war. Madox took out his desert pistol and shot himself right on the spot. The patient reasons that Madox was a man who died because of nations.

 gives the English patient more morphine, which makes him talk in a different way, as if he were outside his body. He talks about Almásy out on a dance floor with Katharine, drunk and making a fool of himself. Neither of them would back down until finally they both collapsed, Geoffrey watching from his chair. Caravaggio wonders who the patient is speaking as now, and watches him and wonders about him. The man who sometimes speaks of himself in the first person, sometimes in the third, yet never refers to himself as Almásy. Caravaggio asks the patient who was talking in this story, and the patient replies, "Death means you are in the third person."

The English patient remembers how he took Katharine from the plane crash and placed her in the cave. He took the colored sand on the cave walls around them and placed it on her body, transforming her as if with makeup. He promised to return to her and walked out into the desert for three days with no food, using only the stars and his shadow to guide his way. When he finally got to El Taj, the English soldiers surrounded him and took him away, refusing to listen to his story about an injured woman who was just seventy miles away.

Caravaggio asks the patient why the English would not believe him. The patient tells them it was because he gave them the wrong name: he gave them his own name, which sounded foreign, instead of giving them Katharine's. At this point in the war, both sides were looking for spies in the desert. The English just locked him up and refused to listen to him.

Caravaggio is still uncertain. He realizes he must break out of this desert that morphine has put him in. He asks the English patient flat-out whether, in trying to kill Geoffrey, he killed Katharine as well. He tells the patient, whom he now calls Almásy, that Geoffrey Clifton was no ordinary friendly Englishman. He was working for British Intelligence as an aerial photographer sent to compile information on the desert as a contingency for whenever that area broker out as a theater of war. British Intelligence knew about Almásy's affair with Katharine the whole time. They thought Clifton's death in the plane crash was suspicious. The English had been waiting for Almásy in Cairo, but finally captured him in El Taj.

Caravaggio explains to Almásy his own role in the war. He was a thief whose skills were legitimized when the war broke out, as he began work for the British and had access to British Intelligence files. Caravaggio says that Almásy had been an enemy of British Intelligence ever since the affair with Katharine Clifton began. They charted his every movement in Cairo and through the desert, and knew that he had worked for Rommel and guided Eppler across the desert. They had figured out the code that was carried in the novel Rebecca a long time ago, and they were waiting for the right time to capture Eppler. Then, after the German had been captured, they were supposed to kill Almásy in the desert, but lost him in his travels. The English patient listens to this story in wonder, surprised that his movements were so talked about by others.

Almásy then fills in the rest of the story for Caravaggio. In detail, he tells him how he waited in the desert for Clifton to pick him up, and nearly missed being killed by Clifton's plane when it crashed. He tells how he carried Katharine from the plane into the cave. Finally, he philosophizes on the nature of love and the importance of dying in holy places.

Analysis

The concept of history plays a large and crucial role in The English Patient. It is the book of Herodotus—itself a history—in which Almásy records not only his travels and explorations, but his thoughts about the affair with Katharine. Ondaatje writes that Almásy's "only connection to the world of cities was Herodotus." It was his habit to glue pieces of paper into the book "over what he thought were lies" and write in a map or sketch of what appeared to him the truth. The Herodotus book, then, becomes not only an ancient history, but a more recent history as well. It details Almásy's own observations, his own affair with the desert. History in the novel is not a static concept, but a flowing, changing force that connects the past to the present.

The Herodotus book highlights the possibility of multiple realities existing simultaneously. The geographical and cultural descriptions Almásy records in the book belie the existence of his affair and obsession with Katharine. Similarly, his clinical, sterilized reports of earthly features to the Geographical Society belie the majesty and emotion associated with gazing upon those features of the desert. One reality or description is no more real than another; rather, what is essential is the audience's choice of which reality to rely on and accept. Writing over the words of Herodotus, Almásy is literally rewriting history, choosing his perception of reality over that of his historian predecessor. In the same way, the audience must choose a reality when hearing (or reading) the story. It is not enough for , Caravaggio, or  to listen to Almásy's stories and understand them in isolation. By connecting them to the present moment, relating them to their own lives, they change the history, introducing a new dimension into it.

Chapter X

Summary

 makes dinner for 's twenty-first birthday, and together they celebrate with , drinking wine and singing. Caravaggio thinks how much he wants Kip and Hana to get married. He wonders how he got in this position.

Hana reflects on Kip. In the tents at night, he has told her all about his home, his family, and India. He has taken her mentally on a tour through his sacred temple, to the tree shrine, into his very favorite places. Hana thinks of her lover as a knight, a warrior saint. She would like to be closer to him, but she knows that his job requires him to separate himself from humanity. In any danger, he creates a space around himself and concentrates. He is able to replace loss quickly, and Hana knows this is part of his nature.

Kip remembers first arriving in Italy in October 1943. The German retreat across Italy had been one of the most terrible retreats in history. They laid mines everywhere, hoping to terrorize the Italian people and the Allies for years. The entire electrical system in Naples had been booby trapped so that the whole city would go up in flames when the electricity was finally turned on again. It was the job of Kip and the other sappers to make sure this did not occur. Naples was evacuated so the only humans left in the town were the twelve sappers. Kip spent the entire night looking for mines and explosives, trying to figure out how an entire electrical system could be bombed. By mid-afternoon he was so tired he could no longer bear it. He lay down to sleep in the back of a church with a statue of an angel above him. At three in the afternoon there was no explosion, but light.

One day in August, Hana sees Kip in the lower field of . She hears him scream an awful sound and sink to his knees in agony, his headphones on. He runs to his tent, grabs his rifle, and charges into 's room. He points the gun at Almásy and says he has just heard that they have dropped  on Japan. He blames Almásy, as a representative of the English, for all of the terrible things the west has done to Asia. He knows that they would never have dropped such a bomb on a white country. Almásy entreats Kip to pull the trigger, to help him end his life, but Kip cannot. He puts the gun down, but a wall of silence has been constructed between him and the white people in the villa.

By morning, Kip has removed all vestiges of military insignia from his clothes. He finds an old motorbike behind the villa and drives away on it, refusing to say goodbye to Hana. As Kip leaves, Caravaggio hugs him, saying that he will have to learn now how to miss him. Kip rides on his motorbike toward the south. He plans to ride to the Adriatic and avoid the army as much as he can. As he is riding, he refuses to think of Hana. He skids on a wet bridge and is thrown, by the momentum of his bicycle, off the side of the bridge. He and the motorbike fall through mid-air into the water. His head rises above the water and he gasps in air.

Hana writes a letter to her stepmother, . She has been unable to write to anyone at home since the death of her father, . She now finds the strength to write to Clara, telling her how her father died, how his men left him after he was burned beyond recognition. Hana mourns the sadness of geography: she, a nurse who knows so much about burns, could not care for her own father because he was far away. But she is comforted by the fact that her father , on a dove-cot, a comforting place built so that doves could be safe.

Years later, Kip thinks of the time he spent with Hana, Caravaggio, and the English patient in a small villa in hills of Italy. He is now a doctor, with a wife and two children, and is permanently busy taking care of his patients. He is happy with his family, whose hands are all brown and who are comfortable in their way of life. Nonetheless, he often thinks of Hana: where she is now, who she is with, what she looks like. She sent him letters for a year, but after receiving no replies, eventually gave up. He thinks of her now, smart and serious, accidentally brushing a glass off a shelf. Kip leans over and catches a fork an inch from the floor, and returns it to the hands of his daughter.

Analysis

The news of the atomic bomb brings the reality of the outside world back into to the sheltered environment of the Italian villa. When Kip hears about the United States' bombing of Hiroshima, he screams, falling to his knees. His pain comes not only from the shattered lives of the Japanese people, but from the shattering of his own ideals. Despite his older brother's anti-western warnings, Kip has put his faith in the west, adjusting to its culture and doing all he can to save it from destruction. He denies, in his own mind, that the west could be as oppressive to Asia as his brother claims. The explosion of the atomic bomb symbolizes the destruction of Kip's entire belief system. The bomb's intrusion on their villa existence highlights the fact that events and realities are not isolated. What happens in Japan touches the very heart of emotions in a small villa in the hills of Italy. Kip responds to the news of the bomb by running away, escaping his life in the villa. He views his running away as a flight from the oppression of the west. Ultimately, however, Hana's suspicion that Kip can so easily move on is confirmed, as he finds himself tied to the life he once led. Kip's emotional tie to Hana  time and geography, and transcends even the great realities of .

The novel's characters frequently mention the idea of "dying in a holy place."  dies in a cave, a holy place to the ancient people of the desert. Patrick, Hana's father, also dies in a holy place, a dove-cot, a ledge above a building where doves can be safe from the rats who try to prey on them. Likewise,  dies in a holy place, taking his life in a church England. This idea of death in sacred places recurs throughout the work, but the meaning of such places in the novel is complex. "Holy place" does not signify a place that is holy to individual people: Katharine hated the desert, Patrick hated to be alone, and Madox lost his faith in the holiness of the church. The locations of these respective characters' deaths were not special to the characters themselves. However, the figurative idea of a holy place touches on the connection between actual places and states of emotion in the novel. Emotionally, each of these characters died in a "holy place" by remaining in the hearts of people who loved them. In The English Patient, geography is transcendent, while it is the sacredness of love that endures.

Themes, Motifs, and Symbols

Themes

Nationality and Identity

Nationality and identity are interconnected in The English Patient, functioning together to create a web of inescapable structures that tie the characters to certain places and times despite their best efforts to evade such confinement. Almásy desperately tries to elude the force of nationality, living in the desert where he creates for himself an alternate identity, one in which family and nation are irrelevant. Almásy forges this identity through his character, his work, and his interactions with others. Importantly, he chooses this identity rather than inheriting it. Certain environments in the novel lend credence to the idea that national identity can be erased. The desert and the isolated Italian villa function as such places where national identity is unimportant to one's connection with others. Kip, who becomes enmeshed in the idea of Western society and the welcoming community of the villa's inhabitants, even dismisses his hyperawareness of his own racial identity for a time.

Ultimately, however, the characters cannot escape from the outside reality that, in wartime, national identity is prized above all else. This reality invades Almásy's life in the desert and Kip's life in the Italian villa. Desperate for help, Almásy is locked up merely because his name sounds foreign. His identity follows him even after he is burned beyond recognition, as Caravaggio realizes that the "English" patient is not even English. For Kip, news of the atomic bomb reminds him that, outside the isolated world of the villa, western aggression still exists, crushing Asian people as Kip's brother had warned. National identity is, then, an inescapable part of each of the characters, a larger force over which they have no control.

Love's Ability to Transcend Time and Place

One theme that emerges in the novel is that love, if it is truly heartfelt, transcends place and time. Hana feels love and connection to her father even though he has died alone, far from her in another theater of war. Almásy desperately maintains his love for Katharine even though he is unable to see her or reach her in the cave. Likewise, Kip, despite leaving Italy to marry in India, never loses his connection to Hana, whom he imagines thirteen years later and halfway across the world. Such love transcends even death, as the characters hold onto their emotions even past the grave. This idea implies a larger message—that time and place themselves are irrelevant to human connection. We see this especially in Almásy's connection to Herodotus, whose writings he follows across time through the desert. Maps and geography become details, mere artificial lines that man imposes on the landscape. It is only the truth in the soul, which transcends time, that matters in the novel.

Motifs

Bodies

The frequent recurrence of descriptions of bodies in the novel informs and develops its themes of healing, changing, and renewal. The text is replete with body images: Almásy's burned body, Kip's dark and lithe body, Katharine's willowy figure, and so on. Each description provides not only a window into that character's existence; more importantly, it provides a map of that person's history. Almásy remembers the vaccination scar on Katharine's arm and immediately knows her as a child getting a shot in a school gymnasium. Caravaggio looks at Hana's serious face and knows that she looks that way because of the experiences that have shaped her. Understanding the bodies of the different characters is a way to draw maps, to get closer to the experiences which have shaped and been shaped by identity. Bodies thus function as a means of physical connections between characters, tying them to a certain times and places.

Dying in a Holy Place

The characters in the novel frequently mention the idea of "dying in a holy place." Katharine dies in a cave, a holy place to ancient people. Patrick, Hana's father, also dies in a holy place, a dove-cot, a ledge above a building where doves can be safe from predatory rats. Madox dies in a holy place by taking his life in a church in England. This idea recurs throughout the nvoel, but the meaning of "holy place" is complex. It does not signify a place that is 'holy' to individual people: Katharine hates the desert, Patrick hates to be alone, and Madox loses his faith in the holiness of the church. None of these characters, then, die in a location that is special to them. But the figurative idea of a 'holy place' touches on the connection between actual places and states of emotion in the novel. Emotionally, each of these characters died in a "holy place" by remaining in the hearts of people who love them. In The English Patient, geography is transcendent; it is the sacredness of love that endures.

Reading

Reading is recurs throughout the novel in various forms and capacities: Hana reads to Almásy to connect with him and try to make him interested in the present life, Katharine reads voraciously to learn all she can about Cairo and the desert, and Almásy consistently reads The Histories by Herodotus to guide him in his geographical searches. In each of these instances of reading, the characters use books to inform their own lives and to connect to another place or time. Reading thus becomes a metaphor for reaching beyond oneself to connect with others. Indeed, it is Katharine's reading of the story in Herodotus that makes Almásy fall in love with her. Books are used to pass secret codes, as in the German spy's copy of Rebecca. In their interactions with books, the characters overlay the stories of their own lives onto the tales of the books, constructing multi-dimensional interactions between persons and objects.

Symbols

The Atomic Bomb

The atomic bomb the United States drops on Japan symbolizes the worst fears of western aggression. The characters in the novel try to escape the war and all its horrors by remaining with the English patient in a small Italian villa in the hills. Staying close to the patient, they can immerse themselves in his world of the past rather than face the problems of the present. The atomic bombs rip through this silence of isolation, reawakening the characters, especially Kip, to the reality of the outside world pressing in upon them. The bomb reminds them of the foolishness and power of nation-states and reminds them of the violability of their enclosed environment.

The Italian villa

In Chapter II, Hana reflects to herself that "there seemed little demarcation between house and landscape." Such an organic depiction of the villa is symbolically important to the novel. Straddling the line between house and landscape, building and earth, the villa represents both death and rebirth. War has destroyed the villa, making huge holes in walls and ceilings. But nature has returned to fill these holes, replacing the void with new life. Such an image mirrors the spiritual death and rebirth of the villa's inhabitants, the way they learn to live again after the emotional destruction of war.

Important Quotations Explained

"Most of you, I am sure, remember the tragic circumstances of the death of Geoffrey Clifton at Gilf Kebir, followed later by the disappearance of his wife, Katharine Clifton, which took place during the 1939 desert expedition in search of Zerzura." "I cannot begin this meeting tonight without referring very sympathetically to those tragic occurrences." "The lecture this evening…"

This passage from the minutes of the Geographical Society meeting of November 194-, serves as the novel's epigraph. In his acknowledgments, Ondaatje notes that some of the characters in the book are based on actual historical figures, but stresses that the story and the portraits of the characters are fictional. As a work of historical fiction, The English Patient draws on the occurrence of the actual tragedy that beset the Cliftons. This excerpt from the minutes of the Geographical Society emphasizes a part of the true historical basis for the novel.

More importantly, though, this excerpt draws attention to the multiple realities, or versions of reality, which exist in the novel. Most of what occurred in the desert was reported to the Geographical Society. News of new discoveries, descriptions of geographical features, and the specifics of desert topography were all clearly reported for the benefit of other geographers. However, the passage above is brief and superficial, which highlights the fact that official reports and history books often omit many stories, emotions, and truths related to the topics they purport to cover. Though in real life the deaths of  and  may have been a mystery, Ondaatje crafts an entire novel around what may have happened to them. The number of possibilities that lie below this brief excerpt are endless. In this sense, the passage perfectly illustrates a recurring theme in the novel: history books—or Geographical Society minutes—do not tell the entire truth.

The desert could not be claimed or owned—it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East…. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.

This passage, narrated by  (the English patient) in Chapter IV, describes his view of the desert. To Almásy, the desert is not only a place, it is an entity with qualities and characteristics all its own. It has tremendous power not only to erase , but to transcend time. In the desert, Almásy feels more connected to the ancient people who came before him than anywhere else in the world. He knows that he has seen and experienced the same desert that ancient peoples made their home. The desert also gains its mystique from its inability to be claimed or owned. Though centuries of people have tried to mark it off and name specific parts after themselves, Almásy realizes that such a measure is foolish. The desert, which is immortal,  any one claim on it.

The desert plays an important function in the novel, not only as a backdrop for action but also as a significant entity in itself. Open, barren, and empty, the blank geography of the desert highlights the foolishness of war between nations. In the desert, Almásy notes, "all of us…wished to remove the clothing of our countries." When men are up against such a harsh enemy as the vast nature of the desert, the different ethnicities among them become meaningless. Living in the desert helps Almásy to realize this, and thus shape his own view of the world.

A novel is a mirror walking down a road…Many books open with an author's assurance of order. One slipped into their waters with a silent paddle…But novels commenced with hesitation or chaos. Readers were never fully in balance. A door a lock a weir opened and they rushed through, one hand holding a gunnel, the other a hat. When she begins a book, she enters through stilted doorways into large courtyards.

This quotation, found in Chapter III, is narrated in part by .  is a motif which is found throughout The English Patient: reading not only helps the characters escape from their wartime situation, but also helps them bring order to their chaotic lives and draws the characters closer together. Hana and , who are initially uncomfortable with each other, grow closer as she reads to him in bed.

In this passage we see the narrator's own philosophy of the novel. Just as George Eliot suggested that the novel was a "mirror held up to society," so Ondaatje seems to suggest that the novel is a "mirror walking down a road." He clearly wants to reflect the reality of life and war, but the process of doing so is not a smooth one. It involves starts, stops, bumps, memories, and glimpses of the past in an attempt to successfully convey a truth. Unlike a history book, there is no assurance of chronology or order. A novel commences "with hesitation or chaos." Just as Hana enters into her "stilted doorways into large courtyards," so do we, as readers of this novel, enter into the story of the English patient.

The Villa San Girolamo, built to protect inhabitants from the flesh of the devil, had the look of a besieged fortress, the limbs of most of the statues blown off during the first days of shelling. There seemed little demarcation between house and landscape, between damaged building and the burned and shelled remnants of the earth. To Hana the wild gardens were further rooms… In spite of the burned earth, in spite of the lack of water. Someday there would be a bower of limes, rooms of green light.

This passage, seen through 's eyes, is found in Chapter II of the novel. It describes the Villa San Girolamo, the house in which Hana and  lived. The building was originally used as a convent, protecting its inhabitants "from the flesh of the devil." But now, ironically, whole pieces of  are blown away, leaving the inhabitants inside largely unprotected. Nevertheless, the villa remains a type of "." The narrator notes that "there seemed little demarcation between house and landscape." Such an organic image is symbolically important to the novel: straddling the line between house and landscape, building and earth, the villa represents both death and rebirth. War has destroyed the villa, leaving huge holes in walls and ceilings. Nature, however, has returned to fill these holes, replacing absence with life. Such an image reflects the spiritual death and rebirth of the villa's inhabitants, the way they learn to live again after the emotional destruction of war.

Every four days she washes his black body, beginning at the destroyed feet…Above the shins the burns are worst. Beyond purple. Bone. She has nursed him for months and she knows the body well, the penis sleeping like a sea horse, the thin tight hips. Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint. He lies flat on his back, no pillow, looking up at the foliage painted onto the ceiling, its canopy of branches, and above that, blue sky.

This passage, found at the beginning of Chapter I, describes the way  cares for the burned . Like many passages in the novel, it is replete with body imagery. The style is excruciatingly descriptive, forcing to us to visualize the unpleasant image of the burned body. It is Almásy's body, the pain of his burns, that ties him to the present moment and connects him to Hana. Without this black body, or what is left of it, he would exist only in the past, merely part of a larger history.

Here we see that Hana imposes religious imagery on the blank screen that is her patient's body. She thinks of his "[h]ipbones of Christ," and views him as her "despairing saint." These ideas heighten Hana's own position in the world and in her mind. If the English patient is great and noble, a saint of suffering, then her status is elevated in her caring for him.

Study Questions and Essay Topics

How is the theme of nationality and nationhood expressed in the novel? Can nationality and ethnicity be transcended?

The idea of national  is continually questioned in The English Patient. One way to answer this question would be to consider some of the characters' different nationalities, and how they respond to their nationality when placed in different situations. , for example, though Hungarian by birth, is educated in England. His speech and mannerisms are so shaped by his education that many people simply assume he is English. However, Almásy rejects all national identity, choosing to shed "the clothes of his country" in the desert, where nationality does not matter nearly as much as character. In wartime, however, national identity is of utmost importance, and Almásy's casual attitude towards national allegiances lands him in a great deal of trouble. To him, it does not seem wrong or unethical to help a German spy cross a desert—he sees the war as just a silly feud between nations. Despite his beliefs, the realities of the world outside press in on him, finding him even in the desert. Even when Almásy's identity is truly masked by his burns, nationality remained oppressive to him.

Nationality also plays a large role for . Though born and raised in India, Kip chooses to join the British army to fight in World War II. Despite the fact that he puts his life on the line everyday to save English lives, he knows that the British still hold contempt for him because of his race. Most of the time, Kip tries to put this knowledge aside and dismiss the fears of his older brother. When  falls on Japan, however, Kip's worst fears are realized. He returns to India, embracing his nationality and his prescribed path, becoming a doctor in accordance with the custom of his family. In the end, neither Kip nor Almásy are able to transcend their nationality. The outside world presses into their sheltered environments and reinforces the label of national identity despite their efforts to shed it.

Describe the function of the body in the novel. How is the body used as a larger metaphor for the connection between people?

In The English Patient the body represents as a vessel for exploration into relationships between people and the larger issue of . The novel is replete with images of the body: 's burned body, 's dark and lithe body, 's willowy figure, and so on. Each description provides not only a window into each character's existence, but, more important, provides a map of that person's history. Almásy remembers the vaccination scar on Katharine's arm and immediately envisions her as a child getting a shot in a school gymnasium.  looks at 's serious face and knows that she looks that way because of the experiences that have shaped her. Understanding the  of the different characters is a means of drawing maps, a way of getting closer to the experiences that have shaped‐and been shaped by—identity.

Bodies also function as a means of physical connection between people, tying individuals to certain times and places. When looking at instances of body imagery in the novel, it is important to pay close attention not only to the words used, but also to the reactions and observations of the other characters to the bodies of others.

How is adultery addressed in the novel? Do the characters feel shame about their adultery? Why or why not?

Though the love affair between  and  is illicit, this illicitness is not the primary focus of their relationship. Passion and obsession overwhelm them, causing them to block out the outside world and its rules of right and wrong. Almásy does sometimes have glimpses of the reality of his actions, and admits that he and Katharine are "sinners in a holy city." Nonetheless, he does not ever show remorse over their deception or betrayal of . Almásy cares only about possessing Katharine, and she alone occupies all his thoughts. Katharine shows a similar lack of regret for hurting her husband. When she finally breaks off the affair with Almásy, she cites the fact that "he won't ever change" and that Geoffrey will go mad. Aside from that admission, however, she does not seem to worry about the consequences of her adulterous liaisons. She, too, is largely overcome and overwhelmed by passion.

The adulterous nature of Almásy and Katharine's affair, then, is merely incidental to the nature of their love. Almásy does mention the fact that while he carries Herodotus—which includes a story of adultery—and sleeps with the wife of another man,  carries the famous adultery novel Anna Karenina yet remains perfectly faithful to his own wife. However, this observation is merely a note of irony that is added to the story. Such an incidental treatment of adultery reminds us that The English Patient is a product of 1992, not 1945. If the novel were written fifty years earlier, the adulterous nature of the affair would likely have figured as a much larger role. Ultimately, the incidental nature of the adultery sheds light on the form of the novel and on the characters themselves, emphasizing the self-centered nature of their attitude toward the betrayal they commit.

Suggested Essay Topics

How does the motif of reading in The English Patient inform the novel as whole?

Describe the role of the desert in the novel. How is this setting intertwined with the themes of the story?

We do not learn Hana's name until Chapter II, Kip's name until Chapter III, and Almásy's name until Chapter IX. Why might Ondaatje have chosen to withhold the names of the characters? What larger implications does this have regarding the characters' identities?

Which characters change throughout the course of the novel? Which ones remain static? What does this personal growth or stagnation reveal about the nature of each character?

Compare Kip to Caravaggio. How do their different emotional reactions to the war emphasize the different types of "humanity" that emerge in wartime?

Schonmuller, Beth. SparkNote on The English Patient. 12 Apr. 2008

<http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/englishpatient/>.

ClassicNote on The English Patient

Character List

Almasy / The English Patient: Almasy is the burned English patient who stays at the village with Hana. He was burned when his helicopter crashed - a crash engineered by the man with whose wife he was having an affair. Almasy is a slippery, cryptic character, and is not particularly adept at self-examination. The characters seem to live through him, using him to heal their own wounds, as Hana does when she chains herself to him to repair the emotional trauma at the hands of her father. Almasy seems at once regretful of the circumstances that led to his lover's death and his own wounds and mystified by the passion that engulfed him, quite literally, in flames. Having lived a full life, he is still amazed by the consumptive power of love, and advises those around him to seek it out, even though it can be as destructive as it is beautiful.

Hana / The Nurse: Hana is a twenty-year-old nurse for the Allies during World War II. She has spent much of her life treating patients and watching them die, and she seems to have a particular affinity for death. Initially we're not sure why Hana chains herself to the English patient in this lonely villa - we sense that she is emotionally wounded, and that she is withdrawing deeper inside herself. She is ultimately brought out by a sequence of events - all of which bring people to the villa, including Kip and Caravaggio, with whom she becomes involved in a love triangle. Hana falls in love with Kip, but he seems emotionally distanced. Almasy urges her to find that fire within and to kindle it. Ultimately it is revealed that Hana lost her father to an accident where he was burned beyond recognition, but she was too far away to save him. She never forgave herself, and chains herself to this English patient for atonement.

Kip / Kirpal Singh: Kirpal Singh is a "sapper" (soldier) for the British, and works in demining and bomb defusion. He found a mentor in Lord Suffolk, but when Lord Suffolk died in a bomb explosion, he, like Hana, turned inwards. At the villa, Kip falls in love with Hana, but we see that deep down he is uncomfortable with his own race, and has never been comfortable being part of a culture that was subservient to the British. 

Caravaggio: Caravaggio is a thief who had his hands amputated when he was caught during the war. He comes to the villa to try to get Hana to leave, since the place is littered with mines. Eventually, however, he falls in love with her (somewhat surprisingly, since he's quite a bit older than her). Ultimately, Caravaggio is her practical guide, where Almasy is her ethereal guide.

Katharine Clifton: Katharine Clifton was the wife of Geoffrey Clifton, and came on one of his expeditions just after they were married. The English patient quickly fell in love with this Oxford-educated firebrand and began an adulterous affair with her that led to both of their demises, when Geoffrey tried to kill them both in a plane crash. Katharine is stubborn and feisty, and is frustrated by Almasy's coldness. She leaves him because he can't bear to be owned by her, but ultimately dies because of the time they spent together. When she dies, Almasy leaves her in a cave, promising to come back, but he is never able to.

Geoffrey Clifton: Geoffrey Clifton is Katharine's seemingly gregarious husband who is part of Almasy's expedition to chart the Terzura Oasis. As a part of the aristocracy, he is fiercely protective of his wife. When he finds out that she is having an affair with Almasy, he initiates a murder-suicide plane crash that kills him and his wife and burns Almasy beyond recognition. Later, Almasy learns that Geoffrey wasn't just on the expedition for an adventure - he was part of British intelligence.

Lord Suffolk: Lord Suffolk is Kirpal Singh's mentor when he is a sapper in the bomb-defusing unit of the British Army. Kip thinks of him as the best English gentleman he has ever met - and one of the best people he has ever known, almost a surrogate father. When Lord Suffolk is blown up by a 250-kg bomb, Kip is expected to take over for him - to be the new leader of the troop - but Kip finds the shoes too big to fill and escapes.

Madox: Madox is the English patient's best friend in the desert. He ultimately commits suicide because he believes the Church is promoting war instead of withdrawing from it. He seems constantly at odds with his practical and philosophical beliefs.

Short Summary

 tracks the convocation of four people at an Italian villa - a nurse, a Sikh sapper, a thief, and a badly burned Englishman - who come to forge an unlikely family, and together discover the secrets of their respective pasts, and the emotional wounds they share.

Hana tends to the burned English patient in a room of their Italian villa. The nurse asks him how he was wounded, and he replies that he "fell burning into the desert" from a plane. His plane crashed in the Sand Sea, and nomadic Bedouins saw him stand up naked from the burning plane, on fire. They saved him, but he had no memory of who he is: after the accident, he knew only that he was English. At night the patient rarely sleeps, so the nurse reads to him from whatever book she finds in the library. Books are Hana's only refuge in the Villa San Girolamo, which used to be an army hospital. The villa was abandoned after the Allied victory, but there are still buried mines all over the property.

Hana is only 20 years and won't leave the English patient even though he is destined to die and the villa is unsafe. Soon, a new character emerges: a man with bandaged hands named , who Hana used to know. He comes to the villa and begs Hana to leave because she cannot stay with all the bombs still left underground, undefused. Hana refuses to leave the English patient.

Caravaggio and Hana go for a walk in the garden. Caravaggio allows her to loosen the bandages and change them, and Hana sees that someone removed both of his thumbs. He tells her a German nurse was called in to do it and would have removed his whole hands if the torturers hadn't suddenly heard the Allies coming. Hana says they must have heard the bombing from outside signaling that the Germans were fleeing the city.

Outside it is raining, and Hannah plays the piano in the library. She looks up, in a flash of lightning, and sees that there are two men in the room. Two soldiers - a Sikh and another man, both holding wet guns. She continues to play until she stops, nods towards them. When Caravaggio returns, he finds Hannah and the two soldiers in the kitchen making sandwiches. One of the soldiers, an Indian Sikh, sets up a tent in the garden. This is Kip, who has come to the villa to demine the property. Hana watches him bathe in the garden, and it's clear she's attracted to him.

Kip finds a large mine in a field north of the villa, and defuses the bomb with Hana's help. However, he is shaken by the experience and resents Hana because now he feels like she feels that he owes her; that he is somehow responsible for her. These feelings bring him closer to her, and soon they become lovers.

Hana sits by the English patient in his room, and he tells her that he was part of an expedition in 1930 that went searching for the lost oasis of Zerzura. There he met , wife of British aristocrat . Katharine was a firebrand, full of passion and moxie, and the English patient, despite his resistance to adultery, fell in love with her. Katharine somehow wanted Geoffrey to find out about the affair, but couldn't bear to tell him. Torn, frustrated, Katharine began physically assaulting her lover - leaving bruises on him from blows, cuts from flung plates and forks. He made up excuses for his wounds, and yet continued the affair, feeling disassembled by her.

Finally, Katharine told him they could never see each other again. She couldn't risk her husband finding out about them. Eventually, however, he did - long after the affair ended. When Geoffrey Clifton found out, he arranged a murder-suicide on a plane trip and crashed the plane, killing himself, mortally wounding his wife, and yet ironically leaving the English patient injury-free.

Hearing all this, Caravaggio tells Hana that he suspects that the English patient is actually Almasy, a Hungarian spy. Hana says the war is over and says it doesn't matter. Caravaggio injects the patient with more morphine and alcohol and begins to ask him questions. The patient tells Caravaggio that after crashing in the desert, he took Katharine's body to the Cave of Swimmers, where he made love to her dead body, wrapped her in parachute material, and promised to return for her. But he was arrested in El Taj by British Intelligence, and didn't return to the cave for three years. He dug up the buried plane and put Katharine inside it. He put fuel into the tank, and they began to fly in the rotted plane. Soon, however, the oil leaked onto him, the plane began to schism, and it fell from the sky in flames.

Kip flashes back to his youth. He was supposed to be a doctor, but the arrival of war meant he would join the army as an engineer - a bomb defuser. The life expectancy in his unit was only ten weeks. Kip's leader was a man named  who Kip adored, but Lord Suffolk died while dismantling a large bomb. Kip left the army when he found out that people expected him to replace Lord Suffolk in position and in vision.

Hana and Kip's affair begins to cool - from lust it turns to celibacy, and soon Kip begins to just hold Hana like his mother held him. She clearly is a surrogate for his deceased mother. Caravaggio asks the English patient if he murdered Katharine Clifton. He says Geoffrey Clifton was with British Intelligence - and Caravaggio says British Intelligence knew about Almasy's affair with Katharine even when Geoffrey didn't. When Geoffrey died, British Intelligence went to capture the English patient and finally did at El Taj. Caravaggio tells Almasy that he worked for the British as a thief and that Almasy was considered a dangerous spy - all of British Intelligence had been looking for him. The English patient knows nothing of all of this and can only attest to his love for Katharine.

One day, Hana sees Kip listening to the radio on his headphones in the garden. He hears something awful, runs into the tent, grabs his rifle, and runs into the villa, into the English patient's room. He tells Almasy that the Allies have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, and wants to kill Almasy for he is a representative of the West - the West that would create such destruction. The English patient begs Kip to kill him, but Kip doesn't. Kip leaves the villa.

At the end of the novel, Hana writes a letter to her stepmother and finally explains how her father died. He was burned, and left deserted by his men. She could have saved him, but she was too far away. The novel ends with Kip, who years later is a doctor with a wife and two children. He thinks often of Hana, who used to send him letters. Because he never replied, she finally stopped.

Summary and Analysis of Chapter 1

Hana, a nurse, is working in the garden when she senses a shift in the weather. She enters the house before it starts to pour and walks into a room where a burned man lies on the bed. He turns towards her. Every four days, Hana washes his black, burned body and pours calamine on his wounds. She tries to feed him a plum. The nurse asks the man how he was burned, and he replies that he "fell burning into the desert" from a plane. His plane crashed in the Sand Sea, and nomadic Bedouins saw him stand up naked from the burning plane, on fire. They saved him, but he has no memory of who he is. He knows only that he is English.

At night the man rarely sleeps, so the nurse reads to him from whatever book she finds in the library. If it is cold, she moves into the bed beside him. He remembers his rescue, the black and white silence in which he healed in the company of the Bedouins. He just lay in a hammock, listening to the sounds of their feet, occasionally letting his mouth open to receive whatever food they gave him.

The nurse has found that books are her only refuge in the Villa San Girolamo. The villa was an army hospital at the end of WW II, housing all the wounded Allies who took over this former bastion of the German Army. Now the nurse has enough vegetables planted for them to survive, and a man comes from town occasionally to give them beans and meat in exchange for whatever soap and sheets the nurse can trade from the reserves left in the old hospital.

The villa was abandoned after the Allied victory, but the nurse and the English patient insisted on remaining behind even when the other nurses and patients moved to a safer location in the south. They are alone in this cold stone house where many rooms are inaccessible because of all the fallen rubble. The nurse sleeps in different rooms depending on the temperature or wind, and sometimes in the English patient's room. She is only twenty years old, and seemingly unconcerned with her own safety.

She picks up the notebook that lies next to the English patient's bed - a copy of The Histories by Herodotus that he has annotated with pages from other books, or his own observations. She begins to read his annotations of the classic text, of the various omnipotent desert winds. She reads about winds that respect no man and can wipe out any sign of humanity, depending on their disposition. She's distracted from her reading by the English patient's eyes on her.

The patient tells her that the Bedouins were keeping him alive for some reason - that he must have been useful to them somehow. He says they assumed he had a skill because his plane had crashed in the desert. Ultimately he says he fulfilled this expectation by accompanying them to a canyon, where the nomads unveiled a stockpile of guns. He was able to tell them just by feeling the guns what their make and gauge was, which helped them match the shells to the guns and reappropriate the discarded weapons as their own.

The Bedouins kept the English Patient blinded most of the time, so that his senses of touch, smell, and hearing became heightened. He traveled with them and was only given sight after dusk where he could finally witness his "captors and saviours." There were no women in the village, and he found desire only when watching a thin Bedouin boy dance alone in the desert.

Analysis

 is an impressionistic, almost surrealistic novel, requiring the reader to piece together fragments of consciousness in order to truly discern a narrative line. The first chapter begins and ends with Hana, who at 20 years old is a rather mysterious protagonist. For one thing, we don't even learn her name in the first chapter. She is prone to self-destructive behavior, spends her life taking care of a burned man destined for death, and seems to have little will to live herself. Indeed, her character might make far more sense as a wizened woman of 50 or 60, but at 20 we're left with the prevailing sense that there is a darkness to her that we don't yet know the extent of. As a result we cannot necessarily trust her intentions. On the surface, she seems completely altruistic - an almost sexless creature of God, dedicated to one man whose life is futile and whose memories will take us on our narrative journey. But will she come into her own right as a character, and admit to a past and a future?

The villa makes an appropriate setting for this patchwork of dreams - indeed, Hana remarks that the abandoned house, now home only to her and the English patient, is itself a dream, a puzzle of hallways and corridors leading to dead ends in some directions and dizzying open spaces in others. It is this circuitousness of narrative that becomes a thematic thread for every aspect of the novel - the idea of portals that can open up into any character's consciousness, for us to imbibe memory, feeling, and dreams of the past, present, and future of anyone at any time. The villa itself has its own haunted history that we're reminded of constantly in future chapters - once, it was owned by the German army and used as a stronghold for their base of operations. Then it was taken over by the Allies and used as a war hospital, where Hana worked. Now, it is a haven of neutrality, occupied only by two.

Hana, as we'll see, is obsessed with the beginnings and endings of life, and it is no surprise then that the novel begins simply with her asking the English patient how he came to be burned. The beginning of his story is one of the most famous passages in the novel, invoking the image of the man on fire falling out of the crashing plane. Notice the sensuality of the imagery evoked by the English patient's memory, even though it is steeped in the horrors of the accident. Is this a product of character? Or of Ondaatje's imagistic language, which often seems too poetic to truly capture the grittiness of suffering? As of now, nothing seems particularly "dangerous" in this first chapter - indeed, there is a decided absence of conflict. How long can the narrative sustain without such conflict?

Hana needs her books to survive, and the library becomes her hiding place. Like the English patient retreats into memory, Hana retreats into fantasy. She has given up on life: she has no interest in preserving her own, and ironically has chained herself to preserving a man who seemingly has no reason to live. In a way, perhaps, the two have a mutually projective relationship - Hana experiences death through the patient, and the patient absorbs Hana's youth and life.

The nomadic Bedouins come across as almost ghostly, dreamy creatures. What is repeatedly mentioned is their silence - and the absence of women, as if they were direct descendants of divinity, without human legacy or tendencies. They take care of him and transport him from place to place, and the patient cannot understand why - until, that is, he realizes that it is for a most pragmatic concern. They want him to teach them about guns. Suddenly the dream of the nomads - their omnipotent mystery - crumbles in the way of pragmatism and war. The lack of women becomes a liability, a symbol of the male penchant for belligerence. It is only when the English patient sees a thin, androgynous boy dancing alone in the moonlight that his sexual desire is reawakened - for in the boy he sees nascent mystery once more, sensual pleasure that has yet to be corrupted.

Summary and Analysis of Chapter 2

A new character emerges - a man with bandaged hands who has been in a military hospital in Rome for more than four months. While in this military hospital, he tells the doctors and nurses nothing about himself, other than his serial number, which confirms that he is part of the Allies and not a member of the German army. Walking past a group of doctors, he hears Hana's name in their conversation and asks them where he can find her. They tell him that she is with an English patient in an old nunnery that was converted to a hospital after the Allies laid seige. The nurse and the patient refused to leave. The man with the bandaged hands leaves to find her.

The point of view switches back to Hana's - she is surprised, even shocked, by the appearance of the man with bandaged hands, a man she once knew, who had come all this way by train and walked four miles uphill in order to find her. He occupies a bedroom and makes himself at home. Hana tells him that she hopes he didn't come to persuade her to leave. She says that if he's going to stay they will need more food - she has vegetables and beans, but she'll need chickens to feed three people.  - the man - responds that he's "lost his nerve," because killing chickens reminds him of his recent misfortune. He was caught by the Germans and they maimed his hands, nearly chopping them both off.

Caravaggio remembers his life as a spy for the Allies, and how they sent him to a German function to steal documents from one of the house's rooms. During the course of the party a woman took a photograph of him, and knowing it might lead to him being found out, he stole into the woman's room at night, while she was having sex, and managed to take back the camera. The woman saw him, but he mimed cutting his throat to let her know that she could not tell on him unless she was willing to risk her own life.

Caravaggio watches Hana eat, but does not eat in front of her as he is embarrassed by the fact that he cannot use a fork or knife anymore. He is taken with Hana, but he realizes she "has chained herself to the dying man upstairs." One day, he finds her sobbing and tells her that she's chained herself to a corpse, despite her protests of love for the burned man. Caravaggio tells her that she's ruining her young life, caring for a ghost.

Hana remembers how she came to be a nurse. First she flashes back to the Caravaggio who embraced her as a youth, the gregarious thief who was always such a character. Back then she was warmer, but now Hana thinks of herself as cold, hardened by her years treating dying patients. When she first saw the English patient, she was taken with him - he had no face, just an ebony pool of charred skin hardened into a protective shell. She remembers that there was nothing to recognize about him. It is this lack of recognizing anything that she's attracted to. When she first became a nurse, she cut off her hair so it wouldn't get in the way, never looked herself in mirrors, and called everyone "Buddy" so that she wouldn't have to use - and then stop using - any patient's name.

Caravaggio and Hana go for a walk in the garden. Caravaggio allows her to loosen the bandages and change them, and Hana sees that they removed both of his thumbs. He tells her a nurse had to do it - that they called in a woman to do it. Hana tells them they stopped torturing him - thus saving his hands - because the Allies were coming. They must have heard the bombing from outside that signaled that the Germans were getting out of the city.

Outside it is raining, and Hana plays the piano in the library. She looks up in a flash of lightning, and sees that there are two men in the room. Two soldiers - a Sikh and another man, both holding wet guns. She continues to play until she is finished, and then nods towards them. When Caravaggio returns, he finds Hana and the two soldiers in the kitchen making sandwiches.

Analysis

Hana isn't actually named until this chapter, through the eyes of Caravaggio. Recall that in the villa, she is nameless - a woman shirking adulthood in order to avoid living life, cowering inside her own body, attached to a man who is faceless, nameless, without a future. As Caravaggio notes, she has chained herself to a dying man in order to expedite her own spiritual death. She has lost interest in life. At this point, we're not quite sure what prompted such a severe disillusionment, but her history as a nurse certainly gives us some idea. Working in a war hospital, she could never make deep connections - she learned not to use names, as soon enough the patient would be dead. When her father died, suddenly it became clear that death was the predominant theme of her life. And now she seems to be waiting for it, even encouraging it's arrival.

Caravaggio is as slippery a character as Hana. On a simple narrative level, he is the foil to the English patient - a living, breathing man in love with her. He realizes that she is emotionally unavailable, but presses her to let go of the Englishman - something that she is clearly not ready to do. When the soldiers show up at the end of the chapter, we see that Hannah is starting to become surrounded by life - and the question becomes whether she will blossom out of her cocoon of death or stay sheltered.

Caravaggio's story reminds us of the terrors of war. In his harrowing story of being caught by the Germans, the detail of the nurse who was brought out to cut off his hands is perhaps the most chilling. There is a clinicalness to war - an antiseptic feeling that permeates the entire book. Notice how much time Ondaatje spends describing smells - the odors of war as a technique for making the imagery richer and more effective. Clearly, Caravaggio still suffers from shock even though he's somewhat physically recovered. He tries to understand how he escaped even more torture, but Hana affirms the pragmatic reason for his survival: that the Germans simply had to leave.

When Caravaggio finds Hana sobbing, she seems to imply that it is because she loves a man who cannot love her back - the dying patient - but we get the sense that she is in truth searching for the love of her father. Somehow, this charred patient, unrecognizable, without a face, has become a surface upon which Hana projects her father, praying for reciprocal love. Caravaggio insists she cannot love him, but Hana responds, "Leave me alone," as if she wants nothing more than to be in this house of dreams where she can fantasize about filling in incomplete parts of herself.

The appearance of the soldiers is an interesting development, if only becomes it happens in such a dreamlike manner. Hana is playing piano in the thunder and lightning when suddenly these men appear carrying guns - even more reminders of death and war in this relic of a house. For a moment, we think it is a fantasy, until we see through Caravaggio that Hana has indeed welcomed these men and is making food in the kitchen with them, as if accepting of the fact that she can no longer be alone in the ruins. Perhaps now, after all this time, she must allow the house, her life, and her soul to be rebuilt.

Summary and Analysis of Chapter 3

One of the soldiers, an Indian Sikh, sets up a tent in the garden. At first he will not come into the house at all, occupied instead with dismantling the mines around the villa, leftovers from the war. Hana watches him bathe in the garden, and it's clear she's attracted to him. The other soldier, named Hardy, has left, but the Indian sapper remains, to the chagrin of  (who is irked by the Indian's habit of humming contemporary Western songs). Caravaggio wanders at night and the sapper follows him, but Caravaggio tells him never to follow him again.

The Indian sapper came to the villa because he heard the sound of Hana's piano-playing. During the war, the retreating German army often left pencil mines within musical instruments so that returning owners would be wounded. Hana loves the physicality of the sapper's movements, his innate sensuality. Caravaggio, however, thinks he is too fussy - that he washes his hands too much. The sapper counters this by calling Caravaggio "Uncle," and responding that in India, you wash your hands all the time, and before all meals.

Caravaggio creeps up on Hana, who is asleep in the library. Hana tells him that she almost had a baby a year ago, but had an abortion because of the war and the death of the father. She was in Italy at the time - and the combination of the war, her work in the hospitals, the death of her father, and the abortion all have pushed her to a place where she is more comfortable with death than with life. For a long time she used to talk to the baby in her head, but then she stopped because there was so much imminent danger during the war that she could no longer live in her head. With all the death around her, Hana says, "I stepped so far back no one could get near me. Not with talk of snobs, not with anyone's death."

Caravaggio and the Sikh take a trip to the valley together and talk about Hana. The sapper says his nickname is Kip, because his first bomb disposal report in England was covered with butter and the officer had jokingly said it was kipper grease. His real name is Kirpal Singh. Kip also meets the English patient, who tells Hana that they're getting along "famously." Hana simply notes to herself that there are too many men in the house now.

Kip finds a large mine in a field north of the villa, and is surprised by its scale and complexity. Hana insists on helping him dismantle it - she holds the wires while he assesses the mine and cuts the right wire. He manages to defuse the mine, but it's a sweaty, intense experience - and one that leaves him terrified and plagued by nightmares. Hana holds him so that he feels safe, but Kip has lost his equilibrium. He feels annoyed that Hana stayed with him while he defused the bomb - because now he feels like he owes her; that he is somehow responsible for her.

Later that night, Caravaggio, Hana, Kip, and the English patient have a party in the patient's room. Kip dances with them until they all hear a faint explosion in the distance. Kip says it couldn't have been a mine, but then he smells the scent of cordite and excuses himself without revealing his suspicions. Kip runs to where the mine went off and finds Hardy, the other soldier, amongst the dead. He buries him and returns to the party to find Caravaggio and the English patient asleep, but Hana still awake. Kip is secretly resentful at Hana's casualness earlier the afternoon while he dismantled the mine - for involving herself without a thought that her life could have ended so easily. All he wants to do now is touch Hana, to feel her, but he is plagued by fear and insecurity. Finally he makes his move: he dismantles the patient's hearing aid and touches Hana's shoulder.

Caravaggio asks Kip whether he would be able to fall in love with Hana if she were less intelligent than him - in other words, if he knew she was his intellectually inferior. He says that Hana is in love with the English patient because he "knows" things - because he's a talker who can seduce with words. Caravaggio says that they should all leave - that they're risking their lives in the villa for no reason. Hana responds that they can't leave the Englishman, and Caravaggio says she is stupid for risking Kip's life for the sake of a man who is already dead. Hana through a subtle physical movement shows that she's allied with Kip - and that Caravaggio's words affect her little. One night, Hana sneaks into Kip's tent, and they become lovers.

Analysis

The love triangle between Caravaggio, Hana, and the English patient is complicated by the arrival of the Indian sapper, Kip. In the last chapters, there was no contest for Hana's affections - she was attracted only to the patient, for he represented death and the spiral of darkness that Hana found so alluring. Caravaggio, with his chastisements and philosophizing, offered little but the vague abstractions that Hana always hated about life. Kip, however, is the antithesis of the English patient - alive, taciturn, in the prime of his life. The title of this chapter, "Sometimes a Fire," thus gives us a sense of Hana's imminent internal conflict and impending journey. If she begins this chapter dead inside, with "no use for men," as she puts it, by the end, she will walk "without a false step" into Kip's tent so that she can be his lover. She will leave the safety of the villa, if even only for a night.

The dismantling of the mine in the garden becomes a symbolic moment in the main characters' journeys. Having fallen in love, Kip clearly wants to be as far from the bomb as possible - and resents not only Hana's nonchalance towards it, but also the fact that he's dismantling it in order to save her. After all, he comes to the villa solely to warn Hana about the possibility of the mine in the piano. He stays because he wants to ensure her safety and de-mine the area, which puts his life at risk, since he would expect Hana to leave the condemned property at his request. Why Hana doesn't leave, of course, is tied in to our analysis of her character in the last chapter: she's afraid to leave the patient she's become so dependent on for a fleeting sense of purpose. She's afraid to leave her refuge from the world. She's afraid to reconnect.

Caravaggio, meanwhile, is obviously in love with Hana, and now with Kip beginning to take over the role of the virile man, he can do little but chastise them both for remaining at the villa, and attempt to mask his jealousy. At the same time, however, he unwittingly drives them into each other's arms by daring Hana to abandon her doomed love for the English patient - to rediscover life in some form. Everyone, it seems, is learning from each other. In Caravaggio, Hana sees a man who can sink into love, someone who can fill up with deep, passionate feelings. In her own heart, she finds nothing but coldness. But around Kip, she begins to feel the "fire" of the chapter title - that inkling that the embers of life might kindle. And so she pursues it, telling Kip that she actually feels happy with him. She's surprised by such happiness.

Of course, there is still an absence of conflict in the novel. At this point, Hardy has died - but certainly not as a direct consequence of anyone's actions, meaning that there is no guilt on any of our protagonist's shoulders. Caravaggio is not jealous enough to be motivated to sabotage a relationship between Kip and Hana, and the English patient is curiously absent through much of the chapter - merely a projective surface for Hana's feelings. So where is all of this leading? Indeed, one of the more subtle aspects of  is its willingness to challenge traditional narrative structure, which often relies on planting incidents and paying them off later, all in the effort of heightening a central conflict. There is no central conflict here as of yet, because no one is in danger.

At the same time, we do sense the beginnings of "plants" that might pay off later. We realize that there are active mines around the property that can kill any of the characters at any given time. We see that Hana is starting to open her heart to Kip and make him vulnerable - should he die, it would likely send her into a spiral from which she would never recover, as she has just spent most of her adult life obsessing about death. And what of Caravaggio or the English patient? Surely they must serve some larger purpose than as mere foils to the Hana/Kip story? As we continue, let us see not only how each character serves Hana's arc, but also how Hana serves their individual journeys. For Ondaatje's novel is less about a central character's journey and much more a dream novel where characters can take us on tangents for the purposes of achieving a greater impressionistic effect - one that suggests how a dying, burned man manages to bring all these characters together and change the course of all their lives.

Summary and Analysis of Chapters 4-5

After the writings of Herodotus, the Western world expressed little interest in the desert for hundreds of years. In the 1920s, the National Geographical Society held a few lectures on the subject of the desert, and in the 1930s, these modest lectures continued. By the end of the 1930s, however, the expeditions had begun again, and the Libyan desert had become one of the theaters of war.

Hana sits by the patient in his room, and he tells her that he was part of an expedition in 1930 that went searching for the lost oasis of Zerzura. The Desert Europeans all knew each other, says the patient - like a small "clutch of a nation" mapping and re-exploring. But on their first journey in 1930, they were hit by a terrible sandstorm that destroyed all their food and most of their animals. He found a desert town called El Taj, where he was saved. His journeys continued until 1936, when he met , who introduced him to his new wife, . Clifton, wealthy, with his own plane, became part of the expedition in search of Zerzura.

The patient says that the expedition party was surprised that Clifton brought his wife, creating a bit of tension between the party members. But one night, Katharine recited poetry and the patient fell in love with her voice. Soon enough he fell in love with her body, her awkward willowness, and they became lovers.

Katharine Clifton dreamt of the English patient one night, and woke up screaming next to her husband. In the dream, she sensed that the patient was angry, hostile that a married woman was close to him. She dreamt she was bent over like an animal, yoked back, unable to breathe. When she met him later, she watched him, talking bombastically, with lofty intellectualism, and thought of slapping him - a desire in equal parts sexual and furious.

Katharine was a firebrand, unable to handle the Englishman's politeness and formal decorum. Though they could not be apart for long, and snuck around for erotic rendezvous, Katharine wanted more. She somehow wanted Geoffrey to find out about the affair, but couldn't bear to tell him. Torn, frustrated, Katharine began physically assaulting the patient - leaving bruises on him from blows, cuts from flung plates and forks. He made up excuses for his wounds, and yet continued the affair, feeling disassembled by her.

Indeed, the English patient, normally frigid, independent, a loner, suddenly found himself unable to be without Katharine. Though he was not comfortable with adultery, he believed that they were an almost cosmic force together. Still, she remained frustrated with their inability to truly be together, and treated him frostily in public.

Finally, Katharine cut him off, saying that they could never see each other again. She couldn't risk her husband finding out about them. He walked her home and told her coldly that he did not miss her yet. "You will," she says. The Englishman admitted he had been truly disassembled: he could not live without her.

Analysis

The novel takes a surprising turn out of Hana's story, into the English patient's memories. Remember at the end of the last chapter, we weren't sure where the story was heading - because suddenly we had a proliferation of characters who had reign over the narrative, able to control it's direction, and we couldn't be sure whether it was a Kip-Hana relationship we were beginning to chart, a Kip- rivalry, or a Hana-English Patient symbolic love affair. Ondaatje surprises us then by following none of these lines, and instead returning to a character we seemingly abandoned - the English patient.

The English patient himself reveals his own torturous love affair with perhaps the most compelling character in the novel, Katharine Clifton. Katharine is very much an untamed stallion. Though she is married to a bit of a wet blanket, she is nothing but raw emotion and fury and passion - something that she manages to disguise in public. The Englishman, meanwhile, is of a loftier nature - more frigid, more intellectual, and in Katharine, he finds a soulmate who brings him down to earth. The problem, of course, is the definition of the relationship.

The Englishman keeps denying to himself that he needs her, then realizes more and more he can't bear to be without her for even a moment. Katharine, meanwhile, can't bear not to have her love be public. She deliberately causes wounds and marks on the Englishman's body so that somehow they might be discovered. But they are not - for the Englishman does not want to be owned, and Katharine does not want to tell her new husband. Finally, their romance is buried.

These are short chapters, but the feelings and imagery conjured in both are intense. Notice how the Englishman first falls in love with Katharine - through the sound of her voice reciting poetry. This harkens back to his falling into the desert from the burning the plane - the raw sounds of the Bedouin voices, the lonely boy dancing and ejaculating in the desert. There is a silence, a loneliness that is intrinsic to the Englishman's soul - and it is appropriate, then, that he begins these chapters with a review of the West's involvement in the desert, which has been intermittent, noncommittal, until the arrival of war. The desert, he seems to imply, has always been too much for the West to understand.

The novel, then, reflects the desert in some way - it is a place of silence where there is a sheer absence of stimulation. The desert is defined more by absence than presence. But then, in a torrent, a sandstorm can arrive to destroy everything. It is the perfect mirror for life - for these characters' lives, who are defined by nothingness, sacrifice, absence, until a torrent of passion consumes them, swallows them up, and leaves them raw, naked, wounded, changed. If we follow the imagery of the desert - the history of the desert, as narrated by the English patient - we clearly see the themes, symbols, and rhythms of Ondaatje's story.

Summary and Analysis of Chapter 6

Hana injects the patient with morphine, and we continue listening to his memories. He returns to 1936, Cairo, when he still was subsumed with thoughts of Katharine. On an expedition, he asked his friend  the name of the hollow at the base of a woman's neck. Madox told him to pull himself together.

 tells Hana that he doubts the English patient is actually English. Instead, he believes the patient is a man named Almasy who worked for the Germans during the war. In the 1930s, Almasy had been one of the great desert explorers - a man who knew deserts and dialects, and went on a search for Zerzura, the lost oasis. When the war broke out, he joined the Germans, became a guide for the spies, and took them across Cairo. Hana brushes off this suggestion, still believing that the English patient is definitely English, but Caravaggio points to an incident a few nights ago when the patient offered a few interesting names while they were trying to name the villa dog: Cicero, Zerzura, Delilah. "Cicero," says Caravaggio, was a code name for a spy.

Caravaggio himself is a morphine addict, and thus knows that an excess of morphine will allow him to create a Brompton cocktail, or a sort of truth serum, for the English patient. He wants to find out once and for all whether the man is Almasy, but Hana says that the war is over and that it doesn't matter. Caravaggio persists, manages to inject the patient with more morphine and alcohol, and begins to ask him questions.

Before he crashed in the desert, the English patient tells Caravaggio he was leaving Gilf Kebir in 1943. His truck had exploded, likely sabotaged by Bedouin spies from one of the armies, and he went in search of a plane that he knew was buried in the desert. After four nights, he found the plane near a place called Ain Dua. He went inside a cave called the Cave of Swimmers, where he had left Katharine's body wrapped in parachute material. He had promised to return to her. He approached her naked, and ultimately made love to her body. He dressed, carried her into the sun, and put her into the plane.

Three years earlier,  had planned a murder-suicide that would involve crashing his plane to kill Katharine and the English patient. The patient says that they he and Katharine were not even lovers at the time, but news of the affair must have reached Geoffrey somehow. The Englishman wasn't hurt in the crash - and Katharine wasn't killed either, just injured badly. She could not walk to safety, so the English patient left her in the cave alone and went looking for help.

In the cave, the injured Katharine - shattered ribs, broken wrist - remembered what happened once they stopped seeing each other. Her husband began suspecting the English patient once they stopped seeing each other in private - for he was so cold to her in public. She left him not just because she was worried about her husband finding out, but also because she knew she could never change him - that he would never ever reveal one more inch of himself to her.

When the English patient returned to the cave three years later, he dug up the buried plane and put Katharine inside it. He put fuel into the tank and they begin to fly in the rotted plane, but the oil leaked onto him, the plane began to schism, and soon it was on fire, falling from the sky.

Hana comes in and finds Kip and the English patient passing a can of condensed milk back and forth. The English patient tells Hana that they are both "international bastards" - born in one place, and choosing to live elsewhere, "fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives." Hana watches Kip and sees traits in him that she has in herself - the emotionally disturbed handmaiden, changed forever by war.

Analysis

The English patient continues his story, albeit elliptically, and we see the tragic conclusion of his love affair with Katharine. Ondaatje is less concerned with creating a compelling "narrative" account of the affair - a chronological account - and more with the vagaries of memory, and how one experiences memory and feelings and buried experience. As a result of this, the English patient tells the story backwards - first he goes in search of a plane, where he finds Katharine's dead body. Then he tells the story of Katharine's death. And finally he returns to where we ended the previous chapter - just after he and Katharine agreed to separate.

Katharine reveals that she left the English patient not just to prevent her husband from finding out about them, but more because she felt like she couldn't change him or open him up any further. He was ice cold, closed up, and had no interest in revealing his deeper character. What's ironic, of course, is that it is only once they separate that Geoffrey Clifton finds out about the romance. As the patient treats Katharine more cruelly in public, her husband begins to suspect their prior history and then seeks to mete out punishment. What he does, of course is extinguish his own life, and then renew the seeming purgatory of Katharine and the Englishman's relationship. The English patient takes her to a cave, promising to return, but doesn't come back for three years.

From a strictly narrative point of view, the English patient's story is seemingly abusive of the reader - it skips in time, leaves out details, and is as fragmentary as consciousness. But it is the point after all, of this novel, to bring together this house of frigid, dead souls, and to let them clear out the cobwebs and rediscover light, to rekindle their fires, if only for brief moments. Each of our characters gets his or her turn to find hope for life once more by revisiting the past.

In this chapter, Hana becomes even more of a bystander, while the other characters reveal their wounds. Caravaggio is a morphine addict, Kip a man who has lost his connections to his emotions, the English patient just a trove of buried memories. Everyone's identity is so tenuous - especially with the war over. Hana has given up connection to the world, and no longer has allegiances. Caravaggio is a thief who shows little loyalty. And no one can be sure who the English patient even is. It is one of Caravaggio's fascinating character quirks that he's so obsessed with discovering who people actually are - as if it will help give him meaning in this villa where identity seems so prismatic.

How Ondaatje begins and ends chapter is of vital interest, for it gives us clues to the next chain of the narrative. At the end of this chapter, Hana turns her attentions to Kip. Previously they were on the English patient - as if her eyes seem to create a narrative spotlight that allow for the expansion and transmission of consciousness. But now she's looking at Kip, and recognizing in him what she sees in herself: disconnection, withdrawal, loss. As the spotlight turns to Kip, we wait to see what has happened in his past to make him seek out this purgatorial villa, where souls that think themselves doomed find their last glimmers of life.

Summary and Analysis of Chapters 7-8

Kip flashes back to Westbury, England, in 1940. In his Sikh family, he was the second son. The oldest was meant to go into the army, the next brother would be a doctor, and the final brother would be a businessman. But with the outbreak of war, Kip joined a Sikh regiment and became part of an engineer unit assigned to defusing bombs. The life expectancy in his unit was only ten weeks.

Kip's leader was a man named , who took a liking to the young Sikh, introducing him to the customs of England "as if it was a recently discovered culture." Kip thought of Lord Suffolk as the best of the English, and truly adored and trusted him. He arrived in England knowing no one, distanced from his family in the Punjab, only 21 years old. One night, he found that Lord Suffolk had been killed by a 250-kilogram bomb while he was attempting to dismantle it. Singh had been with Suffolk for over a year. He buried his emotions, pretended his mentor was still alive, and went to dismantle a second bomb that had fallen half a mile away from the first. He took no one with him.

Kip arrived at the bomb site and managed to dismantle it, keeping the deaths of Suffolk and the other soldiers out of his head. He wrote down his notes on how he dismantled the bomb and handed them to the officers. Because of his nascent skill, he was promoted, and was expected to become the new Lord Suffolk. Kip, however, was used to being an anonymous member of another race, and didn't enjoy the attention. He escaped to Italy where he could once again be invisible.

Kip tells Hana about his family - mostly about his older brother who refused to be subservient to England and ultimately went to jail. He tells Hana that he is different, more silent and serene than his firebrand brother. He thinks his father is still alive, but hasn't had letters from him in awhile. He seems to remember Lord Suffolk much more, as if he is his true father.

In the library,  accidentally nudges the fusebox off the counter and Kip catches it before it falls, preventing an explosion. Seeing Caravaggio's horrified face - a face that reveals that he now thinks he owes Kip his life - Kip merely laughs. Kip flashes back to a time when he was lowered into a pit in a harness to dismantle an Esau bomb. He remembers the frigid pit, how calm he was despite the leaking liquid oxygen, despite all the people watching from outside the pit that he would have killed with a mistake. He remembers that the only person who kept him human during this period was his partner, Hardy.

Hana sits with Kip as he washes his hair. They have a habit of rising at daybreak and eating dinner with the last available light. One night, after blowing out the candle in the Englishman's room, Hana goes to the library. Kip goes to the library to wait for her, and watches her lying on the couch. Caravaggio, seemingly sleeping in the library, is actually awake and knows Hana is there. Caravaggio gets up, walks over to Hana, and extends his arm towards her, but is grabbed by Kip. Caravaggio, steamed by their game, leaves the room. Kip and Hana make love.

At some point, Hana and Kip sleep for a month beside each other without having sex - a formal celibacy. They are reminded of the delicacy of love - the simple comforts of touching, scratching, mutual affection. Kip remembers when his mother died - how he scratched through the sari, scratched the skin, just as he's doing to Hana right now.

Analysis

It's Kip's turn to confess, and it's a confession we eagerly welcome, as he is perhaps the most mysterious character in the novel. Hana, after all, has a clear throughline and clear "need" - namely to remain tied to her patient, to avoid venturing out into the world. But why Kip is here at the villa, why he is so frigid, and why he dismantles bombs still remains unexplained. Here, we begin to get answers. Kip is the middle child of his family, and came to the field of bomb dismantling more or less by accident. But he found joy in the work under the tutelage of Lord Suffolk, who treated him like a son.

If Hana has issues with her father dying, then Kip has them with his mother dying. He seems to have little interest in discussing his father; indeed, he seems to see Lord Suffolk as his father. Much of this chapter, then, is about the coping mechanisms Kip has developed to handle all the pain from his father's rejection, Lord Suffolk's death, and his mother's death. Indeed, as Kip is merely 21, and Hana 20, we can even see  as a coming-of-age novel in its own right - a story about two young people who aren't sure how to find peace, and who have yet to come into their own. (This is a reason why watching the film of  as a substitute for reading the novel is a terrible error. In the film, Minghella recasts Hana and Kip as thirty-somethings, losing the idea that they are simply young, lost, in purgatory.) At the end of the novel, Kip lies in Hana's embrace, thinking not of sex, but of his mother, and of the comfort he tried to find in her at her death.

Lord Suffolk's death seems to have a terrible impact on Kip as well. When Lord Suffolk dies, Kip is treated as his replacement - a man of equal stature and vision. It is, of course, quite similar to a son who has to take over his father's business upon the elder's death. But Kip can't handle the attention, the pressure. He is a quintessential middle child, and flees to Italy, hoping to rediscover anonymity. But here in this villa, his problems, his memories, and his fears return - as if alive in this house of spirits - and in Hana he can only find temporary mollification before sex becomes a burden, and the arms of a woman become a place to face the pain of the past and relive tragic memories.

The English patient vanishes here, and we sense that he is losing his relevance in terms of Hana's arc. Instead, we look to him to guide us through the vagaries, the lessons of love that will soon inform Hana and Kip's eventual maturity. We're not sure if they'll end up together - after all, no love in this novel seems to go without terrible tests - but we do know that they will learn from the English patient, and find in his story a redemption that will guide their own. The real question, however, is that Hana and Kip both seem plagued by the loss of everyone who is dear to them. Hana lost all her patients and her father, while Kip lost his brother, Lord Suffolk, and his mother. All things are in place for either Kip or Hana to die and leave the other to suffer, but the question is who needs the redemption more.

There is also the repeated detail of the dead body that comes again and again in the novel. The English patient makes love to Katharine's dead body in the cave. Kip holds on to his mother's dead body and mimics this with Hana. Hana comes to feel more comfortable around dead bodies than around live bodies. The idea of the soul seems foreign to any of the characters - the body is an end in itself. As we reach the climax of , let us examine whether the characters change in their attitudes towards the body.

Summary and Analysis of Chapters 9-10

The English patient tells Katharine about how he fell in love with her. He says he first saw her emerge from a plane alongside her husband, . He saw before him a married woman who had unexpectedly joined their expedition, and was struck by her khaki shorts and bony knees. He says that she was too ardent, too eager for the desert, but that she took it upon herself to learn all about it - she read everything about the desert, even hunting down marginal articles. The English patient says he was fifteen years older than her, but that she was hungrier for knowledge than he had expected.

He loaned her his copy of Herodotus, and she read from it at a party that Geoffrey threw for the expedition. The English patient says that this is a story of how he fell in love with a woman who read him a specific story from Herodotus. He didn't even have to look up as she read the words across the fire. It was the story of King Candaules, who was married to a woman whose beauty he could not keep to himself. The king told Gyges of his wife's exceptional beauty and arranged for him to sneak into her room and see her undress. But the queen saw Gyges as he left and realized what her husband had done. She told Gyges he had two choices: to slay Candaules and take over the kingdom, or to be killed. Gyges chose the former. Katharine finished the story, and then looked at the English patient. With the help of this story, this anecdote, he fell in love.

The English patient became doubly formal in her company until one day she came to him and said simply, "I want you to ravish me." The two became lovers. They did everything they could to avoid being found out by Geoffrey Clifton, but the English patient knew it would only be a matter of time. He was an aristocrat - he had a large circle of friends and family, one of whom would eventually find out. But Katharine couldn't handle the ambiguity of the affair, telling the Englishman that he just slid past everything with the fear of being owned or named. Eventually, she returned to her husband.

Back in the present day,  injects the patient with more morphine. The English patient continues his story, but no longer uses "I." Instead, he talks about Katharine and Almasy. Caravaggio asks the patient who is "talking" in these memories, for the English patient cannot admit he is Almasy. The patient responds simply, "Death means you are in the third person." The English patient remembers bringing Katharine to the Cave of Swimmers and using the sand on the walls to make her body beautiful. He left, promising to return, but when he got to El Taj, he was just rounded up like a second-rate spy, despite his fervent protests about his dying wife. The patient, interestingly, refers to Katharine as his wife, even though he realizes he should have used Clifton's name.

Caravaggio asks the English patient if he murdered . He says Geoffrey Clifton was with British Intelligence - and Caravaggio responds by saying that British Intelligence knew about Almasy's affair with Katharine even before Geoffrey. When Geoffrey died, British Intelligence went to capture the English patient, and finally succeeded at El Taj. Caravaggio tells Almasy that he worked for the British as a thief and that Almasy was considered a dangerous spy - all of British Intelligence had been looking for him. The English patient knows nothing of all of this and can only attest to his love for Katharine.

Kip and Caravaggio celebrate Hana's 21st birthday. Kip remembers when he first flew into Naples, Italy in October of 1943 as part of a sapper unit. The Germans had brilliantly and viciously attacked the Italians, laying mines all over the city and even sabotaging the electrical system so it would go up in flames once the electricity came back on. The city was evacuated so Kip and his fellow sappers could demine the city.

One day, Hana sees Kip in the garden, listening to the radio on his headphones. He hears something awful, runs into the tent to grab his rifle, and then sprints up into the English patient's room. He tells Almasy that the Allies have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan, and that he wants to kill Almasy because he is a representative of the West - the West that would create such destruction. The English patient begs Kip to kill him, but Kip doesn't. Kip leaves the villa on his motorbike, promising himself that he will not think of Hana. His dismay causes him to skid and fall into the water.

Hana, meanwhile, writes a letter to her stepmother in which she finally explains how her father died. He was burned, and deserted by his men. She could have saved him, but she was too far away. The novel ends with Kip: it is years later, and Kip is a doctor with a wife and two children. He thinks often of Hana, who used to send him letters, but because he didn't reply, she finally stopped.

Analysis

So much of the final chapters of  are about echoes - about the transmission of knowledge and the passing down of wisdom and lessons. Indeed, one only has to look at the final image to see this: in the last moment of the book, Kip catches a fork that nearly hits the ground. This is a seemingly innocuous gesture, but one that mirrors the moment when he caught the fuse box that almost blew up the villa. He has lost his need for a life-and-death struggle, abandoned his desire to cultivate the coping mechanisms that help him feel. He has healed somehow, found maturity, and is now ready to have his own family.

Hana, meanwhile, undergoes her own transition at the end of the novel. She writes to her stepmother, and finally we learn why she has trapped herself in the villa. Her father, it seems, was burned beyond recognition, and she was too far away to save him. Now, the English patient has become a proxy for her dead father. She traps herself in the villa, a utopian compound where she can be with him all the time, in an effort to atone for the "sin" she believes she has committed. She can't let her patient go, for to do so would mean letting go of her guilt over her father. When he finally dies, however, we know that Hana will finally be at peace: she has done her duty.

The structure gets more complicated in these final chapters, as the English patient revisits his earlier story while filling in many of the earlier gaps. We begin to see just how much he was in love with Katharine - so much so that he was blind to everything that was happening around him as the British closed in on him. Indeed, it seems that he forgot his own identity. Even now, when he is close to death, he remembers nothing of Almasy, recalling only his love for Katharine. Caravaggio keeps pressing him to absorb the name of Almasy, to claim it as his own, but the English patient cannot. In death, he only has the memory of love. Everything else is just third-person, irrelevant.

Kip's threat to kill the English patient is ironic, for he was the one who disdained his older brother's confrontational demeanor. Recall that his older brother was thrown in jail because he could not be subservient to anything English, anything Western. Now, the moment that Kip hears about the atomic bomb, he comes after Almasy, believing that if he kills an Englishman he will somehow be able to atone for all the sins of the West. Ultimately Kip doesn't kill the patient and flees, but there is lingering doubt as to whether he's ever really healed. He thinks about Hana even after he has married; even running away - from the villa, from the West, from war, from everything - cannot erase his feelings for her.

In the end, we're left with the sensations associated with healing over the death of a man who came to value love over all else. Almasy is, in fact, the truest symbol of war: a man whose identity is valued by everyone else, but who is unaware of his own political significance. All Almasy ever wanted was Katharine - so much so that he lost touch with time, space, senses, his physical identity, and his political identity. From the English patient's journey, Kip, Hana, and Caravaggio learn that love transcends all. And even if they don't absorb this fully (for they are all young, headstrong, and lost in the whirlwind of immaturity), they all have their individual moments of realization, growth, and transformation.

Major Themes

Healing vs. Denial: One of the more complex themes in The English Patient involves the extraordinary emotional baggage that the main characters bring to the start of the novel. When each character arrives at the Italian villa, it seems they are physically and/or emotionally wounded: Hana lost her father in an accident, Caravaggio lost his thumbs at the hands of the German army, Kip lost his mother and his surrogate father, and the English patient lost both the love of his life and his own body. Each character is given the chance to remember his or her story or speak it aloud, and it is the process of shedding light on the dark corners of their respective souls that seems to bring healing to each one of them. However, denial is a constantly threatening force: Hana refuses to admit the villa is unsafe, Kip has yet to come to terms with his race, and the English patient cannot even acknowledge his own name, because of its entanglement with a separate, politicized identity. The question of how much each character heals and how much each character denies is central to the novel.

Passion vs. Frigidity: In this novel, the union and disunion of characters is often based in their ability to communicate, and their inherent tendencies towards passion or frigidity. Almasy is exceedingly rational and cerebral, and seems completely immune to matters of the heart. Instead, he is concerned with knowledge, with learning in the textbook sense. In Katharine, however, he encounters the opposite - a true firebrand who lives moment to moment wrapped in the flames of passion. Indeed, the two learn from each other: Almasy learns to love, and Katharine begins to become more curious. Their differences, however, are what ultimately undo them: Katharine cannot stand Almasy's coldness, his ability to so clinically separate himself from her in public. The irony, of course, is that it is the passion - the raging furious passion - of her husband Geoffrey that ultimately leads to her death, long after the affair with Almasy has ended. As he recounts the story, Almasy is surprised at how all-consuming passion can be - he can no longer remember all the details of his own politicized role in the world, because all he cares to remember is Katharine and the way she changed him. Hana and Kip struggle with similar issues, in that both have built strong defenses against getting to know people, perhaps because of the deaths of their respective parents. Hana reconnects with life by the end, but we're not quite sure whether Kip does - we know only that he escapes and begins anew.

Drive towards Life vs. Drive towards Death: One of the subtler aspects of The English Patient is revealed in the progression of character arcs - in the ability of our protagonists to either reconnect to life and find reasons to live or to embrace death. The English patient, for instance, hangs on to life at the outset, the glimmers of his romance with Katharine so deep in his memory, so fresh on his lips - but by the end of the novel, after recounting the story, he seems ready to die. Indeed, when Kip confronts him with a gun, he asks Kip to shoot him. Hana, meanwhile, begins the novel moving firmly towards death - she is obsessed with it, even, to the point of wanting to stay in the unsafe villa simply to be with her patient. But as she begins to see what waits for her once she gives up her guilt and leaves him, Hana begins to drift back into the world. The patient, after all, is a substitute for her father - a man who died after being burned. Hana cannot forgive herself for having been so far away when her father died, and thus clings to the patient who represents him. As she learns to forgive herself, she loses her attachment to death and renews her engagement in life.

The Desert: The desert is an inextricable aspect of Ondaatje's novel in that it provides so many dualities for imagery, theme, metaphor - the heat of the day, the cold of the night; the seeming serenity and then the suddenness of storms; the quiet pierced by the racket of war. Remembering his experiences in the desert, it seems like Almasy cannot bring up his memories chronologically. Instead, the desert seems to refract memory. And everywhere is the image of fire - the Bedouin boy dancing in the moonlight, the plane falling out of the sky, the man on fire before he becomes the English patient. It seems almost tamable, but his experiences there suggest the reverse: the volatile desert, able to consume and ravage at will, is always in control.

Loneliness vs. Connection: All of the characters come to the villa without attachment. Hana has nothing in the world but her patient, Kip soon loses his sapper partner, Caravaggio is on the run, Almasy has lost his love. It is crucial, then, to notice how alone these characters are - how they could die in the villa without anyone noticing. Upon reaching the villa, they seem happy in their isolation, but soon enough they begin to connect and to see the threads that they have in common. By the end, even Hana has stopped using the library as a refuge, and instead uses it as a place to playfully prank Caravaggio and Kip.

Surrogate Parents: The characters in The English Patient cling to surrogate parents in order to relive and heal from their childhood traumas. Hana lost her father in a terrible accident in which he was burned to death. She was across the world from him and has never forgiven herself for being so far away, and so she chains herself to the similarly burned English patient to make sure that he is given the chance to end his life in peace. The English patient is clearly a substitute for her father, and the desert a symbol for the physical and emotional vastness between Hana and her dead parent. Kip, meanwhile, has lost his mother, and we see that in Hana's arms, he finds the comfort of a surrogate mother. There is love and lust at first with Hana, but soon it becomes clear that all he needs is the embrace of a woman who he can project as his mother. And just as Almasy made love to Katharine's dead body, now he has Hana revering his dying body, allowing him to die having achieved peace.

Debt: Our protagonists repeatedly seem concerned with what they "owe" others. After Hana stays to help Kip demine the bomb, Kip is resentful that Hana might now expect something from him - that he owes her for her remaining with him under such dangerous circumstances. On the other hand, Hana feels as if she owes everything to the English patient, and cannot survive elsewhere because she is in debt to him. Kip meanwhile believes Almasy owes him a debt for all the lives that were ruined by Indian subservience to the British. Indeed, Kip believes that Almasy, as a representative of the West, owes him something considerable, and nearly takes his life over it.

Glossary of Terms

Bedouin: The Bedouins are a tribe of Nomads that save Almasy when he falls into the desert from the burning plane. They treat his wounds and take care of him, with the understanding that he'll help them regain a treasury of guns they've recently discovered.

Bosphorus: Almasy calls the indentation at the base of Katharine's throat the "Bosphorus." It is his favorite part of her body - the part he remembers the most.

Cicero: In British intelligence, Cicero was the code name for a spy.

disassembled: Almasy uses the word "disassembled" a few times, suggesting that his love for Katharine took him apart, so that he no longer recognized himself. He felt off balance, lost, consumed.

dove-cot: A dove-cot is a large house-like structure that is sacred, and similar to a church. Hana's father dies in a dove-cot, and she takes comfort in the fact that he died in a sacred structure.

El Taj: El Taj is the city in the Libyan Desert where Almasy is ultimately captured by British forces.

harmattan: A harmattan is a type of desert wind that blows across the Sahara. It is filled with red dust that coagulates in the locks of rifles.

morphine: Morphine is a strong injectible painkiller. It is used by the English patient to keep his pain at bay, and by Caravaggio to keep his emotions at bay. Ultimately Caravaggio injects the English patient to learn more about the man's true identity.

pencil bombs: Pencil bombs are sliver-like bombs that can be put anywhere - in books, in musical instruments, etc. Kip comes to the villa when he hears Hana playing the piano because he believes there must be one in the piano, and is coming to save her.

sapper: A sapper is part of the British military unit. Kirpal Singh is a sapper dedicated to defusing bombs and mines.

tannic acid: Tannic acid is a corrosive substance that upon contact with skin turns it into a shell over raw skin. The plane that nearly killed the English patient exploded into a lava of tannic acid that burned his body.

Villa San Girolamo: The Villa San Girolamo is the small villa in Italy that Hana comes to occupy with the English patient. Ultimately, Kip and Caravaggio come to stay here as well. The villa is surrounded with mines that Kip has to defuse.

Zerzura: Zerzura is the name of the lost oasis that Madox, Clifton, Almasy, and the other people on the expedition are searching for. They're also seeking to map the desert on the way.

Author of ClassicNote and Sources

Soman Chainani, author of ClassicNote. Completed on July 10, 2007, copyright held by GradeSaver.

Nationality and Textuality in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient

Gregory O'Dea

The following lecture was delivered as part of the Take Five public lecture series on international fiction at The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, on May 9, 2006.

The title of this year's Take Five lecture series, like our last, is "contemporary international fiction." I'll admit I'm not entirely certain what that phrase means. Given our selections this year and in 2004, we seem to assume it means fiction written sometime since the middle of the last century, or since the second world war, originating from countries other than the United States and the United Kingdom. Honestly, I don't know how contemporary some of it is to some of us; that may depend on a reader's age. And I don't know how inter-national some of it is, either; maybe that depends on the breadth of the work's scope and vision, the degree to which the work and its author are really concerned with internationality: the whole business of nations, of course, but also the whole other business of other nations, too: the inter stuff—their inter-relationships, their interactions, their interpenetrations, their internalizations … and their interpretations. But also their divisions, their tensions, their subterfuge, their wars. Contra-nationality, we might say.

If we can accept that premise, then at least in this year's Take Five series, I confidently proclaim myself the winner. I'm going to talk a bit about Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient. We were all alive when it was first published in 1992, so as a novel it is our contemporary. Its author is Sri Lankan by birth, and an émigré first to England and then to Toronto. Its story concerns two Canadians, an Indian Sikh, and a Hungarian count (who is thought to be English) holed up in a Florentine villa, with flashback memories—those of the Hungarian count (who is thought to be English)—of a multi-national group of explorers working in Cairo and the Libyan desert. There's a little bit, a news report, really, about America and Japan at the end. That's international, folks. I win.

A few notes on Michael Ondaatje himself. He was born in Sri Lanka (then called Ceylon) in 1943, of Portuguese-Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese ancestry. He is, to use the phrase of one of his characters in The English Patient, an international mongrel. As a young boy he moved to England with his mother, then to Toronto, where he attended university and became a Canadian citizen. He is a poet as well as a novelist, and indeed has won many honours for such verse volumes as There's a Trick with a Knife I'm Learning to Do, Secular Love, and The Cinnamon Peeler. His creative memoir, Running in the Family, offers a partly fictional account of his family history and childhood in Sri Lanka. His work of prose poetry, The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, seems to have led him to the prose novella Coming Through Slaughter, which imagines the mythical life of New Orleans proto-jazz cornetist Buddy Bolden. His first proper novel, In the Skin of a Lion, was published in 1987. Set in Canada during the depression, it features among its minor characters a thief named David Caravaggio and a teen-aged girl named Hana. Eight years after The English Patient appeared in 1992, he published the novel Anil's Ghost, set in the midst of Sri Lanka's ongoing civil war.

Yes, Carravagio and Hana have appeared in Ondaatje's fiction before, if somewhat distantly. Ondaatje once said in an interview that the English Patient took him six years to write, and that it wasn't until two or three years into the project that he realized the nurse he was writing about was Hana, the young girl he last seen in In the Skin of a Lion. He was quite surprised to find her here, serving as an army nurse in northern Italy. For Ondaatje, we presume, these characters have an existence quite apart from his own imagining of them.

But back to the problem of internationalism. Ondaatje's novel is certainly concerned with nations, internationality, and contra-nationality. If we want to get straight to the bottom of what it's "about," we could point to the English Patient's

statement about what his work as a desert explorer taught him. "I came to hate nations," he says.

We are deformed by nation-states. Maddox died because of nations … All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. … Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert. …By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, not to belong to anyone, to any nation" (138–39).

That's the novel's bottom line, I think, and the idea it wants to investigate: first, that nations are deforming—that is, they warp essential individual identity by involving it in the illusory construct of nationalism, of group-think; and second, that this collective, deranged psychosis of nations, the illusion that they can be permanent and possessed of the absolute truth, inevitably leads to both large scale human destruction and the betrayal of individual lives.

Now, we'd like to describe how the English Patient has come to this conclusion about nations, and how other characters in the book struggle toward it themselves. If the nightmare of nations is the conclusion, we need a place to begin talking about it—a point of entry, a door into the novel's interior spaces. There are many to choose from. But let me open just one door tonight by talking about The English Patient as a novel that is deeply concerned with text. Having walked through that door, I think we'll find that we're able to walk around the whole edifice of the novel pretty well, as one way of coming at its concerns over nations.

First, understand that I'm construing the term text very, very broadly. By it, I do not mean only printed words on a page, though that's one manifestation. By text, I mean any construct that must be "read," in a figurative sense – that must be

deciphered, decoded, interpreted, in order to unearth buried information. Books and writing, yes, but also art, architecture, music…and, in the case of this novel, bodies, and memories, and bombs.

I'm going to point to some of the more prominent texts in the novel, and various attempts in the novel to "read" certain kinds of texts, and we'll see where this takes us.

The most dominant traditional text in the novel is the copy of Herodotus's Histories that so fascinates the English Patient himself, and that serves him as a kind of common-place book or scrap-book. Herodotus's work is of course seminal to the entire discipline of history and to historiography. Herodotus has been called famously both the "Father of History" (by Cicero) and the "Father of Lies" (by Lucian), for Herodotus himself makes clear that much of what he writes is conjecture and informed bias. The book itself was written in the 5th century B.C.E., and in its account of the wars between Persia and Greece it essentially creates and informs the entire geo-political and cultural traditions of an "East" and a "West," of

Orientalism and Occidentalism, and the struggles of nations and empires. So we can see here that the text of the Histories itself, as a prominent proposition and allusion in Ondaatje's novel, raises the fundamental issues of nations, boundaries, imperialism, and wars, and also of truth and lies, of fact and fiction. The English Patient quotes from and refers to the book often and at length, giving us only fragmentary views of its importance, but certainly enough to realize its general significance. As he puts it, I see Herodotus as one of those spare men of the desert who travel from oasis to oasis, trading legends as if it is the exchange of seeds, consuming everything without suspicion, piecing together a mirage.

"This history of mine," Herodotus says, "has from the beginning sought out the supplementary to the main argument." What you find in him are cul-de-sacs within the sweep of history—how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love" (118–119).

For The English Patient, then, the beauty of Herodotus's history lies in its mingling of vast scope and small stories, in its lack of discrimination between truth and fiction, in its all-consuming generosity.

But that accounts only for Herodotus's book as an idea in the novel. We must also recognize it as an object in the novel—The English Patient doesn't just talk about Herodotus; he holds the book, caresses it, and carries it with him through all calamities. It is his one possession. He annotates his copy, supplementing it with his own texts and observations, as described on page 16: "It is the book he brought with him through the fire—a copy of The Histories of Herodotus that he has added too, cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations—so they are all cradled within the text of Herodotus." We're told that the English Patient's copy of The Histories is swollen to twice its original thickness by these other texts with which it is interleaved and over-written. At various points in the novel, again in bits and fragments, we hear of the Herodotus volume containing a passage from the Bible (1 Kings); lots of different maps; diary entries in multiple languages; paragraphs from other books; references to and reproductions of cave art and gallery art; journal notes; lyrics from jazz songs; a poem by Stephen Crane; a passage from Milton's Paradise Lost, spoken by Adam to Eve; a small fern; an article on desert exploration—and numerous notes on cigarette papers, glued over sections of the Histories recording wars that were of no interest to him.

Now, take a moment to picture this text, as Almasy has transformed it. As I've said, it is rather like a scrap-book, or a common-place book. Herodotus's text, so valued by the English Patient (an 1890 translation by G. C. McCauley, and so

already transformed), is covered over by other texts and objects of his own devising. Herodotus is fragmented, then, and partially buried by the thoughts, memories, keepsakes, and psyche of this particular reader. The whole object is a kind of palimpsest—that is, a manuscript that has been written on more than once, with the earlier writing only incompletely erased and still often legible. There are strata of text here, there's a geology and a landscape here, a partially subsumed and partially excavated history within the text of The Histories. It is a complicated and monstrous sort of text that Ondaatje has imagined for us, and it's not hard to see that in this object the English Patient has created a figure of himself. Or, perhaps, he has become like the book Almasy created. Like it, he rambles, speaking in fragments "about oasis towns, the later Medicis, the prose style of Kipling, the woman who bit into his flesh" (8) and jumping randomly among a bewildering variety of other topics. And like the Herodotus book, the English Patient is not what he seems to be, if judged only by his cover. Some of what he has to say may be truth. Some may not be. And maybe, in the end, such distinctions don't really matter. The presence of this text in the novel says a great deal about the intersections between the grand sweep of history and its cul-de-sacs, about nations and the individual.

Now, I said earlier that texts are things that need to be decoded, deciphered, and interpreted. I want to stick with the Herodotus text a little longer and let this play into other texts in Ondaatje's novel. Why is the copy of Herodotus so important to the English Patient? I've said that it is a figure of the patient himself, a kind of repository of thought, memory, and feeling that takes on the character of its creator. And so it is. But what has made him this way, so full and so shattered at the same time, and what has he then in turn shaped the book to be? The answer, simply put, is love and history, or what he claims is Herodotus's great subject:

"how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love." Or, as he puts the question at one point, "How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled" (158). The intersection of national interests—the international, the contra-national—and individual human beings. The answer, even more simply put, is Katherine Clifton.

What does he say made him fall in love with Katherine? Her reading aloud, before a group but really to him, passages from Herodotus, and Stephen Crane, and Milton. The world's history and literature, made personal. These things are in his Herodotus scrap-book. Where did they meet? In the desert, as part of an international exploratory expedition—the public maps of their personal desert are in the scrap-book, too. Where did they make love? In all sorts of places, but

notably in rooms where images of maps and gardens covered the walls. What was the tenor of their affair? Mad, insanely passionate, violent —all figured in one way or another in the scrap-book. The lyrics of music they danced to and listened to, the fern leaf from a Cairo hotel. Those cigarette papers? A list of Katherine's arguments against him. It is not merely or generally a random collection of The English Patient's odd thoughts, ideas, and interests. It is a textual figuration of

Katherine Clifton and himself—of their history, and of their intimacy.

But The English Patient has always made Katherine over into text, encoding her in metaphor, as if it were impossible to do anything else or to preserve her in any other way. He describes his writing of a scholarly monograph Recent Explorations in the Libyan Desert this way:

I was coming closer and closer to the text as if the desert were there somewhere on the page, so I could even smell the ink as it emerged from the fountain pen. And simultaneously struggled with her nearby presence, more obsessed if truth be known with her possible mouth, the tautness behind the knee, the white plain of stomach, as I wrote my brief book, seventy pages long, succinct and to the point, complete with maps of travel. I was unable to remove her body from the page. I wanted to dedicate the monograph to her, to her voice, to her body that I imagined rose white out of a bed like a long bow, but it was a book I dedicated to a king (235).

And, as the English Patient admits to Caravaggio in that beautiful line, "Her gardens were the gardens I spoke of when I spoke to you of gardens" (236). Here is Katherine encoded as text, buried and preserved in metaphor, like an ancient and mysterious artefact is preserved under the desert.

And why did their affair end? In part, because Katherine feared her husband's jealousy. An old story, of course, but caught up nevertheless in the jealousies of nations. As the world of nations inches toward the brink of war, a man and a woman have begun an illicit affair. But the woman's husband is a covert British agent posing as a neutral civilian desert explorer. Almasy's affair with Katherine triggered security concerns. She ended it while protecting her husband's identity. Her husband found out later, and attempted a suicide-murder via a plane crash in the desert. Individual dramas tangled in the affairs of nations, and now mingling as yet another story, another cul-de-sac of history, coded and cradled in

the text of Herodotus.

Almasy falls in love with Katherine, he says, because she read to him. Because of her voice. This leads us to another set of texts in the novel, since that act of reading aloud is repeated years later, in the Villa San Girolamo north of Florence, where Hana reads to the English Patient at his bedside.

First, let's think about what she reads to him. The Villa apparently has a decent library, and she reads specifically from Rudyard Kipling (Kim), James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans), and Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), and there are some allusions to Tacitus, Stendahl, and a few others. What do these works have in common? Each is concerned with the encounter between the Western European and the "other" – the English and the East Indian, in Kipling's novel; the English and the North American Indian, in Cooper's case; and the English and the West Indian, in Defoe's account. White men and Brown people—and we know how that story goes, tangled as it has always been with the history of empire and nationalism.

Second, let's think about the reading method itself. Hana reads aloud until the English Patient falls asleep, sometimes taking lessons in elocution from him, as when she reads Kipling:

Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, but her did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise (94).

Once the English Patient has fallen asleep, Hana then moves away to another part of the Villa and continues reading silently on her own. So the gaps for the Englishman, as he listened intently or not, had gaps of plot like sections of a road washed out by storms, missing incidents as if locusts had consumed a section of tapestry, as if plaster loosened by the bombing had fallen away from a mural at night. The Villa that she and the Englishman inhabited now was much like that (8).

The delivery of the text is fragmented, both by Hana's skipping ahead in the book, and by the English Patient's interruptions to tell Hana to mind the pauses. There are gaps created in his reception, and gaps to be observed in the full text itself. Like the English Patient's Herodotus text, these bedtime stories are fragmented and layered, coded and evocative. Hana recognizes the connection between these textual fragments, their encoded strata of meaning, and the villa itself, which forms a kind of fragmented, historical text—at first it was a renaissance mansion, then transformed to a nunnery, and more lately used as a German army headquarters, then an Allied field hospital, and now stands as a ruinous shelter for four of the war's damaged refugees. And the text of this building requires a reader, too—one provided as he seems to step out of the pages of Kipling's novel—not the fictional KIM, but Kirpal Singh, or KIP, the Indian sapper. Kip first appears in the novel as he hears Hana's piano playing, rushing to stop her reading of the music lest it detonate a

bomb, wired to the piano or hidden elsewhere in the villa. Kip has come to save Hana, in a sense, from misreading the text of the Villa—a dangerous place disguised as a refuge from the war—just as the English Patient saves her from misreading Kipling, and as Caravaggio comes to save her from misreading the English Patient. All of these things—the villa, the bedtime stories, the English Patient himself—are texts made dangerous by the very idea of nations, and they must be read with great care. Let me talk about Caravaggio for a few minutes, and turn to Kip and his texts before coming back to back to the English Patient himself.

If Kirpal Singh seems to arise from the pages of Kipling's novel, then David Caravaggio re-embodies the great figure of Natty Bumpo from James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales, including The Last of the Mohicans. This character has many names in Cooper's fiction: the Deerslayer, Leatherstocking, the Pathfinder, and Hawkeye; he is a tracker, a go-between, a spy, a thief. As he appears in The Last of the Mohicans, he is middle aged, and his mission in that novel is to escort and protect a pair of young women from the dangers of the French and Indian War. The connections to Ondaatje's Caravaggio are plain enough, and perhaps Hana herself recognizes them on some level when she inscribes Caravaggio on some back pages of her copy of Cooper's novel: "There is a man named Caravaggio," she writes, "a friend of my father's. I have always loved him. He is older than I am, about forty-five, I think. He is in a time of darkness, has no confidence. For some reason I am cared for by this friend of my father's" (61).

Of course, Hana is following the English Patient's lead here, and beginning to construct her own commonplace book in a hauntingly appropriate text about wars and nations and the people who must live with them and between them. Caravaggio comes to the Villa San Girolamo to save Hana, whom he thinks has "tied [herself] to a corpse for some reason … a twenty-year-old who throws herself out of the world to love a ghost" (45). Hana thinks of the English Patient as a "despairing saint" (45) with the "hipbones of Christ"— as someone she can love and care for, as a replacement for her step-father, Patrick Lewis, who was killed in the war. (Patrick, by the way, is the main protagonist of Ondaatje's  previous novel, In the Skin of a Lion.) Possibly a replacement, too, for the young soldier whom she had loved, also killed in the war. Caravaggio believes that Hana cannot stay in this dangerous Villa, and cannot tie herself to this man, whoever he is.

And of course, it is the identity of the English Patient that obsesses Caravaggio. At one point, he considers inventing the Patient's identity in order to prise Hana away from him:

"He needs to know who this Englishman from the desert is, and reveal him for Hana's sake. Or perhaps invent a skin for him, the way tannic acid camouflages a burned man's rawness. Working in Cairo during the early days of the war, he had been trained to invent double agents or phantoms who would take on flesh. He had lived through the time of war when everything offered up to those around him was a lie. But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for the truth in others" (117).

Here, Caravaggio views the English Patient as a kind of text; the only question is whether he is a text to be read, interpreted, excavated, and revealed, or one to be written over, buried under a new skin, and re-created as a fiction. The  English Patient himself is thus seen a palimpsest, like his copy of Herodotus, a dangerous and ambiguous kind of text, written over many times. Caravaggio sees that "reading" the Patient, rather than "writing" him, is the only possibility in this place, at the end of an international war, where they are all shedding false skins— possibly, as the English Patient puts it, "removing the clothing of their countries." Caravaggio must get at the truth, rather than invent a lie. What he gets at, though, is a complicated thing. His theory is that the English Patient is in fact not English at all, but a man named Almasy, a Hungarian desert explorer turned spy-helper for the Germans. Let me take a moment to remind us that Count Ladislau or Laszlo Almasy was a real person, an historical figure, though greatly transformed by Ondaatje to become a fictional figure in this novel. Some notes on the historical Almasy might be helpful, but I will follow the notes with a warning.

The historical Almasy was born in 1895 in a part of Hungary that is now within the borders of Austria. Like Ondaatje's character, he was a self-taught desert explorer and pilot, and in the 1930s he took part in several international expeditions, notably with British explorers, to find Zerzura, a legendary lost city buried in the deserts of Egypt, or Libya, perhaps in the valleys of the Gilf Kebir. In the early 1940s, the historical Almasy worked for the Germans under Rommel's

command as a desert guide, helping spies find their way across the shifting borders of the North African theatre. He may have been a double-agent, though, delivering intelligence to the British as well. After the war, he spent time in a Russian prison, and then was tried for treason by the new communist regime in Hungary, but escaped, perhaps with the help of British intelligence. On a visit to Salzburg in 1951, he became ill and died of dysentery.

That's a brief outline of the historical Almasy. Now for the warning: we should not make a simple equation between this man and the character in Ondaatje's novel. This is not, fact-for-fact, even the person whom Caravaggio believes the English Patient to be. Ondaatje certainly borrows some facts from Almasy's life and his name, but this is only part of the complex, stratified text of the character in the novel. Indeed, what Ondaatje seems to have borrowed most significantly from the historical Almasy is his ambiguity. Did he really discover the legendary Zerzura, as he once claimed to have done? Or, as some historians and scholars believe, was he using the name Zerzura only as a metaphor for the endless quest of exploration? Was he an agent only for the Germans during the war, or did he spy for the British, too? In either case, what would have been his motivations? These are some of the questions surrounding the historical Almasy, and Ondaatje doesn't really attempt to answer them. Instead, he borrows the ambiguity itself in creating his English Patient as a complex text—a text that Caravaggio, in particular, feels he must read and interpret.

Here's what Caravaggio comes up with, though only after crudely drugging the patient and subjecting him to some rather leading interrogation (more ambiguity, then, surrounding Caravaggio's conclusions). The English Patient is Almasy, known to allied intelligence as a spy helper. Before the war, he was an internationally-neutral desert explorer who fell in love and began an affair with the wife of one of his associates, an undercover British agent named Geoffrey Clifton.

The affair ended. Clifton found out about it later, and attempted to kill all three of them by crashing his plane, with Katherine as a passenger, into Almasy in the desert. Clifton died in the attempt, Almasy survived, and Katherine was mortally injured. Almasy sheltered Katherine in the Cave of Swimmers and made the long journey out of the desert to seek help. He was captured by German forces and made to serve as a guide, particularly for Hans Eppler, also known as "The Rebecca Spy" (another text, by the way, another palimpsest). In his criss-crossings of the desert, Almasy attempted to return for Katherine, though she was by now certainly dead. When he did manage to find her again, he repaired a plane that had been buried in the desert, loaded he body aboard, and flew away – only the plane caught fire, and he fell burning from the sky back into the desert, where he was tended to by Bedouin nomads until he was taken to an Allied hospital. We know the story from there.

All of this is pieced together by Caravaggio from fragments—sketchy intelligence reports he had already, bits and pieces from the English Patient's Herodotus text, snatches from the rambling narrative given by the Patient himself while under the influence of too much morphine. In the process of "reading" the English Patient and interpreting him as Almasy, though, Caravaggio learns to love him. He'd wanted to save Hana from him, and perhaps to exact revenge for his own mutilation under the knives of the Germans, but in reading the English Patient, he also finds a version of himself—a spy, a thief, a wildly romantic and poetic soul.

Like Hana, who interprets the English Patient as something she needs, a saint, a father-figure, a lover—Caravaggio's reading of Almasy is personal and self-reflective.

Let me turn now to Kirpal Singh, to Kip, and his texts. I have at least two intertwined texts in mind here: the English Patient, again—for everyone reads and interprets that text—and bombs. As I've said, much of Kip's time around San Girolamo during that summer of 1945 is taken up with "reading" the villa and its grounds—unearthing the hiding places of booby traps, excavating the war's hidden history there. Decoding and disposing of bombs. It's something he's devoted his career to doing. We learn most about Kip in the section entitled "In Situ," which of course means "in its place," and in sapper terminology refers to the need to dispose of a bomb as one finds it, without moving it. But this section of the  novel also details Kip's training as a sapper, his first-hand encounter with the English culture—and his feeling very much out of place. As an Indian, of course, he has long had a distant view of the English; India is at this time part of the British Empire, after all. But his military training under Lord Suffolk, his mentor, has revealed in him a long standing admiration of the English, and of Western European culture in general—a culture to which he wishes to belong, though he cannot. His relationship with Lord Suffolk has taught him to love the English, but also that his place among them is fragile, at best. Recall that Kip's older brother is a political agitator against British rule in India, a view to which Kip cannot subscribe. Recall, too, Kip's worshipful adoration of the cathedral frescoes, the white marble Italian statues, the madonnas and prophets; indeed, he falls in love with Hana partly because she seems like one of his virgin madonnas come to life, even as he seems to her a figure from a Kipling novel. And the English Patient, too—whom he calls "uncle"—is read by Kip as quintessentially English, and becomes a replacement of sorts for Lord Suffolk, another surrogate father lost to the war.

And then there is again the matter of bombs as texts. Time prohibits my quoting them in full, but I refer you to the novel's engrossing descriptions of Kip defusing a bomb in situ — the first on pages 98–99, the second on pages 190–199, and their very plain figuration of the bomb as a kind of text, one that must be read and understood in order to be defused. The English Patient remembers engaging in much the same process when he was used by the Bedouins to "read" or "translate" the makes of buried guns. Another kind of text that reveals much about its author.

Now, think for a moment about what it would mean to a young man who had spent his career defusing bombs, preventing them from exploding and killing, to hear about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as Kip does over his wireless radio near the novel's end. He's already discovered new innovations in bomb design, new land-mining techniques, as he's gone about his work in this war.

He's thought a great deal about what a bomb can reveal about its designer. But to hear about this…a bomb the text of which cannot be read and defused, deployed against entire cities—and, as he realizes, against cities of Brown people, by the English ("you're all English," he says), by these people he has come to love. It is thoroughly devastating. Kip, who seems to Hana to have stepped out of the text of a Kipling novel about the white man's burden, a reader of bombs, has heard of the great unreadable text, one that brings his entire world to an end. As he says bitterly while leveling a rifle at the English Patient:

I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often, from your country. Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world. You and then the Americans converted us. With your missionary rules. You had wars like cricket. How did you fool us into this? My brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe. The deal makers. The contract makers. The map drawers. What have I been doing these last few years? Cutting away, defusing, limbs of evil. For what? For this to happen? (283–85)

Caravaggio explains to Kip that Almasy isn't an Englishman, and Kip replies, American, French, I don't care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman. You had King Leopold of Belgium and now you have Harry Truman of the USA. You all learned it from the English. (286)

And Caravaggio admits to himself that Kip is right; "They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation." (286).

We're told earlier in the novel, at the beginning of the section entitled "Sometime a Fire," that "The last medieval war was fought in Italy in 1943–44" (69). That might seem a puzzling statement, but it presages Caravaggio's thought near the novel's end, that this nuclear bomb means "a new war. The death of a civilization" (286). There can be no quaintly bombed-out villa in Hiroshima or Nagasaki, no leftover bombs for Kip to read, interpret, and defuse. And Kip? He feels all the winds of the world have been sucked into Asia. He steps away from the many small bombs of his career towards a bomb the size, it seems, of a city, so vast it lets the living witness the death of the population around them. He knows nothing about the weapon.

Whether it was a sudden assault of metal and explosion or if boiling air scoured itself towards and through anything human. All he knows is, he can no longer let anything approach him, cannot eat the food or even drink from a puddle on a stone bench on the terrace. He does not feel he can draw a match out of his bag and fire the lamp, for he believes the lamp will ignite everything. In the tent, before the light evaporated, he had brought out the photograph of his family and gazed at it. His name is Kirpal Singh and he does not know what he is doing here. (287)

Earlier in the novel, we're told that Kip cannot enter a room without thinking of the possibility of bombs there. Now, the "English," as Kip would say, or Europe, or the West, seems to have made the whole world into a bomb. And what, then, does this bomb say about its designers? In this moment, the whole nightmare of nations leaps into a new dimension. In this moment, for all of Ondaatje's characters, the text of the world—its books and maps, its art and music, its bodies and its history, its very geography—explodes.

I've tried this evening to make the case that The English Patient is at least in part about the nightmare of nations, and that examining the novel's evident concern with textuality is one way—but only one way—to approach that idea. There are many others, and perhaps we can talk about some of them after the break.

AMERICAN COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS. INTERNAL MEDICINE. DOCTORS FOR ADULTSTM.

http://www.acponline.org/about_acp/chapters/tn/english.pdf

Maps in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient.

By Ahmad M.S. Abu Baker

2, June 2008

Introduction

The English Patient is a novel which richly encapsulates the past within its folds. The novel refers to Almásy’s book of Herodotus The Histories which, the narrator notes, is “twice its original thickness” (pp.94-95). Almásy “added to [it], cutting and gluing in pages from other books or writing in his own observations—so they all are cradled within the text of Herodotus” (p.16). It was “his commonplace book” which contained “other fragments—maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books” (p.96).

Ondaatje’s novel is similar in its structure to Almásy’s book. He takes “fragments” and “paragraphs cut out of other books” and includes them in his novel. The novel is so rich with intertextuality including references to portraits, statues, myths, Christian imagery, and desert images. Ondaatje’s novel is swollen with these different images just like Almásy’s common place book is swollen to twice its original thickness.

In one scene, Hana fixes the steps in a staircase in the villa. “The staircase had lost its lower steps during the fire that was set before the soldiers left.” She brought “twenty books and nailed them to the floor and then onto each other, in this way rebuilding the two lowest steps” (p.13). Hana’s use of the books to fix the stairs parallels the readers’ and critics’

attempt to “nail” all the different books and images Ondaatje refers to in his novel to reach, as if climbing a staircase, into the ‘room’ where knowledge is stored. Ondaatje leaves clues to the thematic importance of some references to help his readers dig, like archaeologists, into the history of this reference or that. For instance, while the book of Kim lay on Hana’s lap, “she realized that … she had been looking at the porousness of the paper, the crease at the corner of page 17 which someone has folded as a mark”(p.7, my italics). The importance of this book is revealed later, upon the arrival of Kip.

The ends of the earth are never the points on a map that colonists push against, enlarging their sphere of influence. On one side servants and slaves and tides of power and correspondence with the Geographical Society. On the other the first

step by a white man across a great river, the first sight (by a white eye) of a mountain that has been there forever. (p.141)

In The English Patient the emphasis on the importance of maps is evident. People, books, faith, and works of art are all reduced to maps, to their skeletal structure. This reduction is a form of deconstruction similar to the deconstruction of bombs in the novel.

Almásy is considered a traitor for giving the Germans the desert maps. His ‘treason’ justifies the novel’s preoccupation with maps. The gravity of his ‘crime’ is evident in the following analysis which highlights the importance of maps.

Maps, Colonization, and Identity

Maps, as a form of knowledge, give power to those who have them. Almásy claims that his ability to draw maps motivated the Bedouins to save him. He explains that “[t]he bedouin were keeping me alive for a reason. I was useful, you see …. I am a man who can recognize an unnamed town by its skeletal shape on a map” (p.18). The Bedouins try to

make use of Almásy’s vast reservoir of information. “For some he draws maps that go beyond their own boundaries and for other tribes too he explains the mechanics of guns” (p.22). Almásy claims that he has “information like a sea” in him, and that he “knew maps of the sea floor, maps that depict weaknesses in the shield of the earth, charts painted on skin

that contain the various routes of the Crusades” (p.18, my italics). These maps have the power of great destruction since they depict “weaknesses in the shield of earth”. These “weaknesses” would be exploited to create a destructive earthquake or to erupt a volcano in the enemy’s land.

Heble observes Ondaatje based his character of Almásy on that of a real person. “Almásy’s slippery identity, [is] an analogue to the ‘English’ patient’s in the novel” (Tötösy, p.145). Tötösy argues that “Almásy’s fictional position, that is, his indeterminacy, overlaps his ‘real’ position of historical marginality and otherness” (Tötösy, p.148). Almásy’s knowledge of maps is his ‘compass’. He only needs “the name of a small bridge, a local custom, a cell of this historical animal, and the map of the world would slide into place” (p.19). He boasts, “[g]ive me a map and I’ll build you a city. Give me a pencil and I will draw you a room in South Cairo, desert charts on the wall” (p.145). Indeed, maps give him

great navigational abilities. Hence, he relies on maps, even ancient ones, while crossing the desert (p.167). David Roxborough points out that when “[c]onsidering the theme of mapmaking and orientation in the novel, Isaiah 40:3 is especially relevant: ‘The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make straight in the desert a highway for our God’” (Roxborough 1999).

Almásy’s knowledge made him a very dangerous traitor when he joined the Germans. His vast knowledge worried the Allies. Foucault explains that “power and knowledge directly imply one another … there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations” (Foucault 1977:27). Caravaggio claims that Almásy “knew every water hole and had helped map the Sand Sea. He knew all about the desert. He knew all about dialects”. The Germans relied on Almásy’s knowledge in 1941.

Almásy “became a guide for spies, taking them across the desert into Cairo” (p.163). His knowledge of the desert, especially of the location of water holes, means life or death to those who want to cross it. His knowledge of the dialects guaranteed a safe cover for the spies among the Bedouins.

Almásy and other explorers give lectures at the Geographical Society in London about their expeditions. These explorations are supposedly conducted for scientific purposes.

However, they are performed for military and colonial purposes. The introduction of longitude and latitude lines reduced Earth to “measured boxes”. According to Anderson, explorers, surveyors and soldiers have the task of “filling in” these boxes, a matter which generates an “alignment of map and power” (Anderson 1991:173). Simpson considers mapmaking as a type of “the imperial arts, where by territory, property, empire are imagined, inscribed, maintained” (Simpson 1994:225). Further, maps are an exclusive discourse, a “paradigm which both administrative and military operations worked within and served” (Anderson 1991:173-74). “One names the land in order to obtain a certain control over it through the framing operation of language” (Penner 2000). Hence, mapmaking suggests a future military invasion of a geographical area that is being mapped to facilitate the movement of the invading troops and to highlight the strategic points of defence/attack for these troops. Consequently, Almásy wonders, “[t]his country—had I charted it and turned it into a place of war?” (p.260).

The colonisers constantly gather information about the geography of the land and the characteristics of the people who live in it. This knowledge guarantees the ‘smooth’ dominance of the coloniser, and it functions to alienate the colonised in their own country by changing its geographical and even ecological identity. Edward W. Said warns that “[i]mperialism after all is an act of geographical violence through which virtually every space in the world is explored, charted, and finally brought under control.” He notes that for “the native, the history of his or her colonial servitude is inaugurated by the loss to an outsider of the local place, whose concrete geographical identity must thereafter be searched for and somehow restored (Eagleton et al. 1990:77).

Almásy uses an 1890 edition of Herodotus’ Histories as a “commonplace book” in which he keeps “other fragments—maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books” (p.96). This book is his “only connection with the world of cities”. It is “his guidebook, ancient and modern, of supposed lies” (p.246). Herodotus’s

Histories “becomes the metaphoric bridge across time and space that replaces simple historicist conceptions of time” (Walder 1998:203-4). Simpson claims that the “marvelous discourse generating the History serves to bridge the explicitly colonial divide of metropoly and periphery, and to gloss problems of truth and falsehood in ways that only intensify the difficulty of distinguishing one from another” (Simpson 1994:222). According to Stephen Batchelor, the origin of the enmity between East and West is found in Herodotus and is due to “the epic conflict between Hellenes and Persians, giving rise to the mythical contrast between heroic, liberty, loving and dynamic west and the despotic, stagnant and passive East” (Clarke 1997:4). Clarke’s claim renders Herodotus a focal point, a ‘centre’, or a vortex in which all history, especially that of East and West, is condensed. It also invokes the colonial crusades, which are depicted on maps that reveal “the various routes of the Crusades” (p.18). Further, it invokes wars as old as those of Hellenes and Persians which are fought for imperial reasons. The book itself is a proof that history repeats itself, and that the present is an echo of the past.

Almásy and other explorers use literary legends and Herodotus’ Histories to explore reality. Almásy imagines that “he had walked under the millimetre of haze just above the inked fibres of a map, that pure zone between distances and legend between nature and storyteller. Sandford called it geomorphology” (p.246). The use of an ancient book of history in these explorations testifies to the strength of knowledge that outlives its own time.

Herodotus’ book remains, according to Almásy, useful even in modern times not just for scholarly study but for colonial exploration and exploitation of the natural resources of other countries. The explorers of the desert are “men of all nations”. They are described as “sunburned, exhausted men, who, like Conrad’s sailors, are not too comfortable with the

etiquette of taxis, the quick, flat wit of bus conductors”. They “cling” to their old maps and lecture notes (p.133). Further, they have entered into their own heart of darkness by going to the desert. Their experiences in the desert makes them, like Conrad’s Marlowe, wise, sad, and uncomfortable with the city way of life.

The desert erases people’s identities. Almásy loses his white skin, a race marker, when he falls into the desert. “All pilots who fall into the desert—none of them come back with identification” (pp.28-29). To other Europeans, he resembles one of the “mad desert prophets” (p.251). Katharine, too, loses her race marker (her blue eyes) when she dies in the desert. “Only the eye blue removed, made anonymous, a naked map where nothing is depicted” (p.261, my italics). The desert strips them of any form of identification. It makes them like its own nature, without defining contours and without race markers. Tom Penner remarks that a “desire for erasure is present throughout the English patient’s narrative” (Penner 2000). Simpson suggests that “[i]dentity, nationality, and acts themselves all provide an occasion for torture, for a rewriting of the body by way of pain” (Simpson 1994:230).

Hence, Caravaggio’s body was “rewritten” after the discovery of his identity by cutting off his thumbs. Caravaggio “had been trained to invent double agents or phantoms who would take on flesh” (p.117). Therefore, he is trying to “invent” a skin for the English patient. The “desire for erasure” foreshadows the ultimate erasure, that of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki which is a wiping out of a nation. Simpson notes that “the adumbrations and irradiations of this apocalypse, those shadows seared onto ground, align nuclear ‘photography’ as a killing inscription with imperial, racist methods of repression and erasure” (Simpson, p.230). Further, David Williams claims that Almásy tries to “atone for his earlier mistake in charting the desert, or erasing the past” (Penner 2000).

The characters in the novel live in a desert both metaphorically and/or literally. The metaphorical desert is implied in the reference to Stephen Crane’s poem (p.97). All the characters are living in their own metaphorical deserts trying to cope with their traumatic war experiences. The description of the places Kip and his fellow sappers walk through seems to echo that of the desert with its anonymity. “Every river they came to was bridgeless, as if its name had been erased, as if the sky were starless, homes doorless” (p.129). See the introduction for more details on the effects of war on the characters.

Almásy, however, experiences both types of deserts. Hall claims that when people search for their identity they “tend to isolate themselves … as if they are running to the desert.” They can also “make their homes the deserts they run into”. Hall suggests that:

[T]he desert is thought of as nothingness waiting to become something, if only for a while; meaninglessness waiting to be given meaning if only a passing one; space without contours, ready to accept any contour offered if only until other contours are offered; space not scarred with past furrows, yet fertile with expectations of sharp blades; virgin land yet to be ploughed and tilled; the land of the perceptual beginning the place-no-place whose name and identity is not-yet.” (Hall 1997:3)

Almásy has a desire to return to a ‘pure’ state like that of the desert in which his ‘self’ is not marked by nationality, race, and other social frames which limit, label and frame him. Almásy’s love for the desert reveals his wish to live in similar conditions. He states that:

We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I believe in such cartography—to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map … We are communal histories, communal books …. All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps. (p.261, my italics)

It is a strange wish for a mapmaker to live on “an earth that had no maps”. The desert reduces people to their common humanity. Its “cartography” is the ‘true’ form of labelling to Almásy, who is against the racist labelling of others. This “labelling” echoes Madan Sarup’s process of labelling which affects the way people think of others (Sarup 1996:14). Rufus Cook notes that “[i]n contrast to Katharine, the English patient regards distinctions of race and class as ‘walls’ or ‘barriers’ (155), as a source of distrust and conflict” (Cook 1999:43).

The English patient “seems to transcend time, place, and ethnic origin”. He becomes “a synonym for absence or anonymity” since “he has no defining substance of his own, no containing or delimiting skin (117)”, and this allows him to assume “one new cultural identity after another” (Cook, p.46). Ondaatje constructs “a fictional individual, who is inbetween and peripheral”. Tötösy also refers to “Almásy’s rejection of homogeneity, national self-referentiality and its exclusionary results” (Tötösy 1994:235). Almásy’s opposition to other forms of labelling stems from his realisation that sciences including Anthropology and Ethnology are colonial practices used to legitimise the colonisation of races on the basis of their ‘natural’ or ‘genetic’ inferiority.

A map is a form of order, control, and deconstruction. Almásy sees everything in the shape of maps. This could be related to his profession as a mapmaker, but it is also related to the importance of maps. He “rides the boat of morphine. It races in him, imploding time and geography the way maps compress the world onto a two-dimensional sheet of paper”

(p.161). Even works of art do not escape being mapped. For instance, the map which shows the path Kim and the lama take in Kipling’s Kim (p.167). This map helps Almásy control his understanding of Kim. Missing something of the plot does not obstruct or limit his understanding because he is “familiar with the map of the story” (pp.94-95). Other references to maps include “the great maps of art” (p.70), “the various maps of fate” (p.272), and “mapped … sadness” (p.270). Rufus Cook notes the “the need to ‘map’ … some aspect of reality, and thus to identify some ‘original pattern’ (193) underlying ‘the external world of accident and succession’” (Cook 1999:35). He explains that works of art help the characters “define their identities, their purposes, their relationships with others” (Cook, p.36). He adds that “[t]he characters struggle to ‘map’ or ‘choreograph’ their environment; they want to understand ‘how the pieces fit’”. “Outside ‘great maps of art’ (70) there is no order, no security, nothing that can define or delimit the self, or keep it from slipping away into another time, place, or set of cultural terms” (Cook, p.44).

Maps play an important role in Kip’s life. To him, they mean the difference between life and death. He uses them in deconstructing bombs and mines which he reduces to their skeletal shape. They represent an order without which anarchy and “deluge” would follow.

After the death of Lord Suffolk, “Kip had suddenly a map of responsibility”. Maps give those who have them power—a matter that echoes Foucault’s knowledge/power binary. Hence, Kip feels uncomfortable with his newly acquired power because he was “never interested in the choreography of power” (p.194). He is accustomed to being invisible and having such power means becoming visible.

The loss of maps could cause disasters, even Armageddon. The narrator refers to a “deluge” that sweeps away “free will, the desire to be elegant, fame, the right to worship Plato as well as Christ.” He also refers to “bonfires—the burning of wigs, books, animal hides, maps” (p.57). This “deluge” sweeps away everything and denies restoring order by destroying maps. Further, following the nuclear bombing of Japan, Kip imagines “the streets of Asia full of fire. It rolls across cities like a burst map” (p.284). Kip tries to rationalise the extreme power of the colonisers. To him, knowledge is what gave them the upper hand. He informs the English patient that “[y]our fragile white island … with customs and manners

and books and perfects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world.” It is knowledge, especially knowledge of maps, which made the white race stand “for precise behaviour”.

The statements which Kip makes about the global effect of the British echo those of Clarke who remarks on the West’s “systematic” process of “imposing its religions, its values, and its legal and political systems on Eastern nations” (Clarke 1997:7, my italics).

His words also echo Said’s who maintains that “a white middle-class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition ‘it’ is not quite as human as ‘we’ are” (Said 1987:108, my italics).

Kip’s questions highlight and link knowledge and power:

Was it just ships that gave you such power? Was it, as my brother said, because you had the histories and printing presses? … And Indian soldiers wasted their lives as heroes so they could be pukkah. You had wars like cricket. How did you fool us into this? (p.283, first two italics mine)

The English “had the histories and printing presses”. Hence, they have a power, like that of Almásy, which is a concomitant of knowledge. The colonisers knew the first rule of colonisation: “know thy enemy”. The need for knowledge justifies the studies in Anthropology and Ethnology for colonial purposes.

The colonisers’ possession of the “histories and the printing presses” leads them to regard themselves as “custodian[s] of the values of civilisation and history, [with the mission of] bringing light to the colonised’s ignominious darkness” (Memmi 1974:74-6). This “mission” must be carried out regardless of what the colonised races think of it. Most colonisers believe that the colonised do not know what is good for them. Hence, when the colonised resist to adopt the colonisers’ values and religion, they are bombarded, as in the “incomprehensible, firing into a continent” in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (Kimbrough 1971:14). In Conrad’s novel, “thunder and lightning” (Memmi, p.57), which reflect the enlightenment the colonisers supposedly bring to the colonised, are transformed into cannons and fires.

Similarly, in Ondaatje’s novel they are transformed into the nuclear bombing of Japan. Said explains that “[a]pparently benign Orientalising ethnocentrism becomes bloody, repressive ethnocentrism, violent positing action of ‘the West’ which works to assert its plenitude through caricature, suppression, or obliteration of the other” (Said 1978:180-2, my italics). Imperialism and capitalism also necessitate finding new markets and guarding them militarily. The colonised races are the consumers of these new markets, and they have to be guarded from competitors by all means. The nuclear bombing of Japan invokes Said who maintains that Europe’s “role in the non-European world was to rule, instruct, legislate, develop, and at the proper times, to discipline, war against, and occasionally exterminate non-Europeans” (Eagleton et al. 1990:72, my italics).

Further, Kip’s questions suggest that history is written by the strong. Historians can/have depict(ed) the colonised races negatively. The power of the printing presses helps them promote the stereotypes and myths the colonisers generate about the subject races. It also helps them promote a discourse aimed at legitimising to the world the inhuman practices colonisation inflicts on the colonised races. In addition, the association between war and “cricket” suggests that the colonisers enjoy these wars as if they are games. It also implies the frequency of these wars. In both cases, the value of the life of the colonised races is undermined substantially. Kip’s words demonstrate to what lengths the colonised might

go, sacrificing their life for the colonisers in the hope of being admitted into their camp.

In The English Patient all wars prove to be the same. Ondaatje links the Medieval wars with those fought in Italy in 1943-44. The same towns “had been battled over since the eighth century”, and “if you dug deep beneath the tank ruts, you found bloodaxe and spear” (p.69). To Ondaatje, past events remain ‘alive’, and history repeats itself. The idea of modern wars being similar to past ones is echoed in Field Marshal Kesselring’s idea of “pouring hot oil from battlements” (p.69). The expertise of Medieval scholars is also used though they “kept forgetting the invention of the airplane” (p.69). Further, the references to “the stone pulpit where Hercules slays the Hydra” and to “the Tree of Good and Evil inserted into the mouth of the dead Adam” convey the effect that modern war fair are echoes of past events.

Furthermore, the English patient tells the interrogators that “the Germans have barracked themselves into villas and convents and they are brilliantly defended. It’s an old story—the Crusaders made the same mistake against the Saracens. And like them you now need the fortress towns” (p.96). J. Hillis Miller describes the novel as a “pattern of eddying repetition”, and Rufus Cook maintains that it is “constantly reduplicating some incident from an earlier page” (Miller 39 in Cook 1999). Hence, “meaning or being or identity is always deferred or displaced” (Cook 1999:37). In addition, Cook explains that “[b]y breaking through this ‘time-defeating’ narrative mode of experience, the English patient escapes the

constrictions of a phenomenal existence. He can then immerse himself in the atemporal, archetypal world of Homer, Herodotus, and Kipling, and in the non-sequential, ceremonial time of Bedouin ritual and myth” (Cook, p.48) Brian Johnson suggests that “Ondaatje sees the past under the surface of things”, and that his “fiction deciphers identity and bleeds through borders.” Johnson also claims that Ondaatje “writes with the compassion of a literary peacekeeper, exploring the aftermath of violence in narratives that telescope back through time” (Johnson 2000). The English Patient presents the reader with the danger of colonial sciences, such as mapmaking, and the concomitant power they give to the colonisers. After all, were it not for the importance of maps, Almásy would not be labeled as a ‘traitor’.

Conclusion

Ondaatje introduces the Indian Kip as a revolutionary version of Kipling’s Kim. Like Kim, Kip begins as a devoted colonised who serves the British Empire. Kim remains the devoted servant of the empire and works against his own people, whereas Kip rebels against it after the nuclear bombing of Japan and casts away his ‘colonised shell’. He evolves from the ‘cocoon’ of colonisation and flies away like a ‘butterfly’, back into the country he was born in. Ondaatje depicts the racism which Kip was subjected to and allows his reader to view the ‘Other’ point of view, unlike Rudyard Kipling, for instance, who does not touch upon such issues. Indeed, in the final analysis, Almásy’s ‘crime’ of giving the Nazis the maps of the desert is not so grave. The Nazis are abhorred for their racism, but what they did is very small when compared to the scale of what the Allies’ nuclear bombs did to the ‘brown’ races. Kip and Caravaggio believe that such a bomb would not have been dropped on a white nation. The bombing becomes an embodiment of imperial racism, which is much stronger than that of the Nazis.

Almásy’s stay with the Bedouins allows him to ‘erase’ his identity, his sense of a nation, and he ‘sinks’ into anonymity. Nationness and nationality are tantamount to sins in Ondaatje’s work. They are reasons for conflict and for wars, and they stop people from assimilating. Almásy becomes another Kip; he devoted his life to chart the desert for the Royal Society thus turning it into a war field. However, like Kip, he has a turning point. He becomes the English patient who refuses to admit his identity and who wishes to live on a land that has no maps. This image is emphasised by the reference to Caravaggio’s painting of David with the head of Goliath. “Youth judging age at the end of its outstretched hand” (p.116). The English patient sees in Kip his former state as a devoted servant of the Empire.

He can also see the potentiality of Kip’s revolution against the Empire.

The English Patient presents the reader with the danger of colonial sciences, such as mapmaking, and the concomitant power they give to the colonisers. After all, were it not for the importance of maps, Almásy would not be labelled as a ‘traitor’. The novel concludes with Kip learning that it does not matter how close one gets to the colonisers, for one remains treated as an outsider/‘Other’. Kip resembles Turkey to a certain degree, which has been trying to be admitted into the European Union for so many years now but its request is still denied. The novel leaves us to “swallow [our] history lesson” (p.285). Eventually, in Ondaatje’s novel “all that remains is a capsule from the past” (p.33).

Nationhood and decolonization in The English Patient

,   by

Introduction

Ondaatje's The English Patient has had a brief but spectacular history. The novel won the Booker Prize after its publication and received very positive reviews; the film dominated the 1997 Academy Awards. Yet the relationship between the film and the book is an intriguing and complex one. Indeed, one might argue that the film is not so much an adaptation, but rather a transformation of the novel: a set of variations on a number of fictional themes and structures. Certainly, Ondaatje worked closely with the filmmakers on the screenplay, but it is the differences between the film and the novel, or between the screenplay and the novel, that are most striking. A brief account of some of the main characters, and the major exclusions and inclusions (in the film), will suffice to reinforce this point.

The Story of Katharine and Hana

The film reverses the order of importance in relation to the two women. In the novel, Hana is the dominant character along with her patient-and it is crucial that he is her patient in a literal and metaphorical sense: she cares for him, and the reader is encouraged by the narrator to wonder, more or less constantly, why she has taken upon herself this unenviable task; but he is also the catalyst of a number of crucial changes in her own life. Indeed, the novel is persistently concerned with her motivations and intentions, though in a highly elliptical and fragmented manner. We learn that she sees him as a "saint" (45), that she wishes to save him (52) (one presumes in a number of senses since he is not just burned but is also the one who tells Madox that "there is no God"), and perhaps most importantly, that she encounters him after the death of her father (who was also burned).

So, in the novel, Hana represents a type of redeemer and one who finds an opportunity to exercise that compassion and care which she could not offer to her burned father. In other words, the novel suggests that her growth and compassion, and her quest for a symbolic connection with the absent and painful figure of the father, are at the heart of the story.l The film, on the other hand, simplifies her story considerably: the major point in the film is that she is motivated by the fact that she is a nurse. Many of the complexities and ambiguities that are apparent in the book disappear. Moreover, the film erases the many religious and mythical associations in the book. So, the Patient is not so much a saint-like figure in the film-not so much a figure in whose presence she will find a type of mythical release and fulfillment and through whom she will realize a mythical sense of redemption-but rather a shadowy figure in whom she will find the realization of her sense of duty and her sense of care. In other words, the mythical functions of the relationship in the novel are superseded by the ethical demands which she affirms (by implication) and to which she nobly adheres in the film.

Katharine is a much more dominant figure in the film. This is quite understandable given the narrative conventions that govern a film of this kind. The director has decided to make this a love story with many melodramatic elements and, of course, it is the lovers who are featured. So, Katharine is introduced much earlier in the film and is developed much more as an individual character. In the novel, she remains a shadowy but intriguing figure; in the film she is a beautiful and distinctive character who commands Almasy's (and as a consequence, the viewer's) full attention. In the novel, she only commands the reader's attention as a fascinating and passionate trace of Almasy's past; in the film, she is given more screen time, it seems, than Hana herself.

It is notable that poetic and memorable lines which are included as narrative points of view in the novel become lines that are addressed to Katharine in the film. In this way, the narrative function of poetry and explication in the novel is transformed into an aspect of the lovers' growing sense of unity in the film: for example, the discourse on the winds in the novel becomes a discourse that is meant for Katharine's ears in the film. And Katharine's struggle between the demands of duty (to her husband) and her inclinations (towards Almasy) is heightened in the film to such a degree that it parallels Hana's own conflict between her love of Kip and her duty toward the Patient.

Once again, however, this parallelism is quite understandable in the context of the conventions that govern the genre of which this film is an example. Melodrama has been associated with explorations of "inner voice" (Elsaesser 69), that is, of inner turmoil and conflicts and of strong emotions (Durgnat 136). It has also been argued that this genre employs linear narrative with flashbacks and "parallel action" to explore characters in moral and emotional terms even as it highlights the "irrational forces of desire" (Lang 47-49); that this genre interrogates notions of pleasure and fantasy reveals the contradictions within middle class ideology (Gledhill 7-13), and embodies these in ways which many can recognize and know (Byars 18). It is not difficult to find such aspects in the film: the inner turmoil caused by jealousy is apparent in Katharine's husband and the inner turmoil of the adulterous lovers is apparent, at least initially; the emotions on all sides are heightened in terms of character and soundtrack; "irrational forces of desire" are reflected in an affair which has terrible consequences (Katharine dies alone); and the contradiction between Katharine's duty as a married woman and her desire for the Patient, and analogously, between the Patient's desire for her and his sense of the marital bond, is quite apparent in the film. In Peter Brooks's terms, this is a "drama of morality" (20).

The film highlights Katharine's love and death to a striking degree: the most passionate music is reserved for her scenes with Almasy; many of the most dramatic shots (Almasy lifting Katharine from the shattered plane; Almasy carrying Katharine to the Cave, leaving her and returning to her belatedly), and many of the most poignant scenes in the film, involve Katharine. She is clearly no longer a trace from a shadowy past, but in many ways a conventional and fully realized romantic-melodramatic figure: she falls in love with another man, commits adultery, and in conventional melodramatic mode is made to suffer terribly for her transgressions and for her adulterous and passionate desire-just as her lover suffers terribly because of his love for her, and his association with her.

The English Patient and the Other

The film transforms the image of the Patient himself. Once again, this change was no doubt dictated by the demands of melodrama and the visual requirements of the film. Crucially, the Patient in the novel is incapable of facial expressions since his burns are so severe. The reader is told that he has no expression, that his nerves have been destroyed (29), and that he has no face (48). A faceless, expressionless protagonist could hardly do for a melodramatic love story on film, even though these personal attributes serve to intensify the nature of Hana's care and love for the Patient in the book.

Also, the book emphasizes the Patient as a figure who has no fixed identity in this context: his identities-count, lover, spy, geographer, loner, poet, and so on-in the book are fleeting, fluid, and difficult to pin down, because the book is concerned in a profound way with the sense in which identities are fleeting, fluid, and multifaceted. The "facelessness" is important in another sense, too: in the Patient's "facelessness" and in the multiple identities that can be projected upon this tabula rasa, so to speak, Ondaatje provides a stark and vivid image of that freedom from the constraints of "nationhood" which the novel otherwise affirms.

The novel insists on the connection between nations and war or killing: Madox's death, for example, is understood in terms of the conflicts that "nationhood" engenders ("Madox died because of nations" [138, 242-note the repetition]). In this sense, the novel's aim is deconstructive, that is, it attempts to dismantle the oppositions that nations construct between themselves in order to facilitate the process of war or killing. Ondaatje is not working in a vacuum here. "Nationalism" has drawn many different interpretations but many commentators have made the connection between nationalism and destructive, extreme, or threatening behavior: Karl Deutsch has linked it with intolerance and racialized distinctions (63); Louis L. Snyder (Meaning 25), Anthony D. Smith (359), Erica Benner (62), and Conor Cruise O'Brien (79), among others, have drawn attention to the territorial claims that it entails and/or the expansionist agenda that it affirms. Other analysts have drawn attention to its militarism (Howarth 84), to the privileging of national sovereignty over global welfare (Snyder, Varieties 117), or of national identity over other claims (Plamenatz 23). And some have linked it directly with animosity toward other cultures and nations and a consequent advocacy of annihilation (Aller 18) or with morally intolerable guiding principles (Maccormick 103).

It is difficult to say if Ondaatje is aware of this material, but it seems clear that there are many parallels between the novel's insistence on the negative aspects of nationalism and the destruction wrought in the name of nationalism, for example, in the two world wars (a point that is made forcefully by Snyder [Varieties 19]), on the one hand, and the aggressive or destructive aspects highlighted in many commentaries. There is considerable emphasis on the hatred of nations and on the wish to abolish them, and, by implication, nationalism and its divisive qualities ("I came to hate nations" [138]; "Erase nations" [139]). Certainly, there is aggression between nations in the novel as well as conflict, suffering, and death. The novel provides an explicit critique of the annihilation that nationalism partly or wholly motivates (for example, when it deals with the catastrophic results of the atomic bomb).

In any case, the differences between the nations (Germany, Britain, Hungary) dissolve or de-construct in the Patient's expressionless and faceless countenance: to Hana's gaze (but not to Katharine's), he could be a German spy or an English patient. The key symbolic point in this respect in the book is that such things cease to matter in the light of Hana's love and care for him, or more broadly, in the light of the fundamental affinities that exist between seemingly disparate people such as Hana, Caravaggio, Kip, and Almasy; or in the light of life among the desert tribes (138), which symbolize in the novel a sort of independence from nationhood and its destructive aspects. There is a cohesion here that is lacking in the conflicts that are played out in the light of nationalism in the novel. And indeed, some commentators have pointed out that decolonization is caused, at least in part, by an "inability to cope with the problem of giving nationalism an internal cohesion and dynamic" (Sathyamurthy 163). These constructive human relationships in the novel-described in terms of a "tableau" of four characters (278)-seem to be affirmed partly in contrast to the lack of cohesion that conflict, nationhood, and nationalism engender on the international stage.

Crucially, these characters are, after all, brought together in a time of conflict and enmity and yet manage to forge between themselves something that is quite beautiful and lasting in the architectural ruins that surround them (surely the ruined chapel in the novel and the ruined church in the film are loaded metaphors in this respect).2 And on a meta-discursive level, the war and the gatherings in the ruins engender the celebrated novel itself, which is a response to the terror and the mayhem, and the novel, in turn, engenders the celebrated film, which is not lacking in a beauty of a different kind (the beauty of the desert).

In the film, the Patient's face expresses many emotions and the camera highlights a number of these (in close-up). He does have a face and it registers many emotions because the film is not as concerned with the notion of shifting identities and because the dramatic possibilities are far greater in visual and cinematic terms if the Patient can show emotions such as sorrow or grief, in relation to his past, or gladness and relief in relation to the treatment he receives from his nurse.

It is notable, too, that the Patient is a spy in the book: he cooperates with Rommel and takes Eppler across the desert to Cairo. In the film, he turns over the maps to the Germans in return for Madox's plane and makes his way back. The difference is interesting: it is as if the filmmakers decided not to emphasize his betrayal of the British, perhaps because it would undermine the primacy of the love story in the film. After all, in the conventions of melodrama and in love stories, the task is to make the male lover as attractive, not as suspicious, as possible. The tragedy of the lovers in the film would have been undermined perhaps by the union of an Englishwoman and a committed German spy. Instead, the film suggests that Almasy turns to the Germans because of the demands of his love and because the British refuse to cooperate with his plans. In any case, the demands of the love story seem to be paramount in the film: almost everything else is subordinated to these demands. As a consequence, Almasy is a figure who is ennobled, again in true melodramatic fashion, by the nature of his sacrifice. The audience, of course, warms to him even more, and as a consequence, feels more sad-more intense emotion-when his relationship with Katharine ends with her death. Once again, this is a good example of how the demands of the genre and of the medium transform the contents of the fiction.

It is also interesting to note that Kip's role is very much diminished in the film. His role in the book is quite crucial for his career serves to highlight the not entirely harmonious relationship between the British for whom he works and the colonized land from whence he came: he belongs to two worlds, in a sense, and yet is still an outsider (271); a wanderer (270). In other words, the novel focuses on the issue of the cultural hybrid with his mixed loyalties and the dual cultures to which he belongs, in order to show perhaps that such cross-cultural relationships are not necessarily reducible to black and white terms or to traditional binaries such as oppressor and oppressed, colonizer and colonized (indeed, the novel makes it clear he began to love the English at an early stage [190]). The point is that Kip does not see all Englishmen as oppressors and colonization as entirely negative (7273) even though the impact upon his life and family has been considerable and, in some senses, damaging. He seems to have a more fluid sense of the relation between nation and identity, or, in other words, he seems to reject the stark binarism that characterizes a number of accounts of the relationship between colonial expansion and post-colonial affirmations of independence. He is certainly aware of ambiguities (188), even though the question of race and racism also arises (189).

The novel is also concerned explicitly with the dream of colonization:

The ends of the earth are never the points on a map that colonists push against, enlarging their sphere of influence. On one side servants and slaves and tides of power and correspondence with the Geographical Society. On the other the first step by a white man across a great river, the first sight (by a white eye) of a mountain that has been there forever. (141)

In passages such as these, the novel is clearly concerned with the places that cannot be adequately represented on the maps of the colonizers, which is why the novel mentions problematic aspects of mapping on a number of occasions. It is as if mapping is an extension of the colonial enterprise to Ondaatje's mind. It is notable too, that this map-making is associated in one sense with power, servants, and slaves. In other words it is partly associated with the spread of hegemony and mapping seems to facilitate this process. In this sense, the novel provides an implicit and explicit critique of colonization and its geographical and imperial concerns. As a corollary, the novel will celebrate the very things that elude the maps of the colonists: the novel in fact insists on the distinction between the "cartography" of nature and the maps fashioned by colonists on which labels appear like "the names of rich men and women on buildings" (261), just as it celebrates the former and is critical of the latter. Ondaatje's sympathy lies with those who affirm an "earth with no maps" (261), that is, an earth without the impositions of the colonists. Kip is important in this context also, since his native land represents the very terrain that the colonists' maps attempted to encompass or name.

If he can be called an "other" in the novel-and Arun Mukherjee has discussed the notion of otherness critically in relation to Ondaatje's poetry (113ff)-in the sense that he represents the sometimes harmonious, sometimes troubled, attempt to integrate or combine different aspects of a complex self (trained soldier, loyal serviceman, hero, lover, subaltern and so on), then his role in the film is more simple. He provides the love interest in relation to Hana and does his duty for the military. The troubled cross-cultural relationships evoked so vividly in the book are all but lost, perhaps because these issues would detract from the primacy of the love stories in the film, or perhaps because the traumas of decolonization and uprootedness are so disquieting that they may turn audiences away at the box office. (Or more cynically, perhaps these issues are too peripheral or too alienating to merit inclusion in a film which insistently draws attention to the lovers and their adulterous relationship in the desert or in the ruins of Italy.)

A Story of Two Endings

The end of the film is notable partly because it differs so substantially from the end of the novel. The film ends with a shot of Hana striding purposefully along a road that leads away from the architectural ruins in which she had completed her duty of care to the patient. This is a strikingly affirmative image: she is less constricted here by her past; there is little or no sign of her bondage to the past and to its terrors, anxieties, and sorrows (indeed, there is something like a half-smile on her face); the sun is shining (a transparent melodramaticsymbolic element); the road on which she walks may be the symbol of her liberation from the burden of her past and the demands of her duty, which she has nevertheless fulfilled. Indeed, she seems confident, assured, and crucially she seems to have been healed, so to speak.

The film gives the viewer every reason to believe that the future will be better than the past which it has recorded. And she is alone; she strides out alone toward an unclear destination (from the viewer's point of view). It is as if the film is insisting on her independence at last. This is crucial: for much of the film she has devoted herself to others. Now, she makes her own way and, one presumes, on her own terms, and the image is telling and forceful. It is as if she has found a strong sense of identity and strength from her relationship with the patient; indeed, one might say that the death of the patient has not only liberated her but strengthened and revitalized her. In this sense, the death of the patient seems to function as a precondition of the re-fashioning of her life and she has every reason to be refreshed by her devotion to the dying man and the pleasure that he experienced in the last stages of his life in relation to her presence. Her purposeful demeanor at the end is surely no coincidence.

In this context, then, the film seems to record a rite of passage which culminates in her transformation as a carer or nurturer, but also as an independent and purposeful woman. Her life has been rebuilt and revitalized even as the patient's life has ebbed. This dialectic suggests forcefully that what she takes from this relationship is not at all like the things she had taken from the relationship with her father (though the film does not give a detailed account here). The key point is that the relationship with the patient has symbolically reinvoked, reinscribed, and redeemed the fragmented relationship with her father; in finding her true and chosen place with the patient, she has, by implication, symbolically exorcized the demons of her troubled relationship not only with her past but also with her own kin. So, in this sense, the film can be read broadly as a metaphor of reconstructive capability across cultural and national boundaries and in terms of mythical paradigms of passage (from bitterness or dejection to positive transformation; from disintegration to a restoration of interpersonal connections and commitments).

The novel does not end like this at all. It affirms a mysterious connection across space and time between Kip and Hana:

And so Hana moves and her face turns and in a regret she lowers her hair. Her shoulder touches the edge of a cupboard and a glass dislodges. Kirpal's left hand swoops down and catches the dropped fork an inch from the floor and gently passes it into the fingers of his daughter, a wrinkle at the edge of his eyes behind his spectacles. (301-02)

Once again, the book is much more focused on the relationship between the two. But here, two lives seem to have developed independently of one another: Kip is married and successful; Hana is abroad. However, the novel insists on the unbroken connection in symbolic terms. Kip's act is somehow linked to Hana's dislodging of the glass in the closing lines. Even though they are separate in one sense, there is an unbroken relation between them which seems to be enduring and irrevocable in another sense. In other words, there seems to be an implied continuity between the glass which is dislodged and the fork which is falling, and between the act of dislodging the glass and the act of swooping down and collecting the dropped fork. Perhaps Ondaatje is suggesting that this is the consequence of their earlier union; or perhaps he is suggesting that there is something mysterious between them which the passage of the years or of time cannot destroy; or perhaps he is suggesting that their relationship did not, cannot, end with their physical separation.

On any level, he is clearly interested in the mysterious link that is perpetual; in the sense in which the being of one affects the being of the other. And the link between the one (the being from an old world in whom colonization and decolonization intersect, namely, Kip) and the other (the one in whom the past, the present, and the future are inextricable in a fundamental sense and in whom the confidence and purposefulness of the New World are ultimately and implicitly embodied) is precisely the type of metaphor that Ondaatje's book highlights: two nations, two nationalities, meet and the space of the intersection is transformed, for the result is memorable and affirmative. The implication is touching and unexpected: despite the evolution of their lives as individuals or as family persons, the things that they shared have a quiet and sustaining vitality and an undiminished, secret life that bridges two worlds, countries, and modes of being.

The novel suggests ultimately that Kip and Hana are not alone; that the secret connection between them is irrevocable. In this way, the novel's end suggests, once again, to be sure, that it is the things that bring two nationalities or two people together, and not the things that separate them, that are ultimately of the greatest value. Ondaatje is not just interested in dislocation,3 then, but in reconstruction and a sense of continuity ("he [Kip] sees her always and her face and her body" [ 300])-and he connects these things with the interrogation and dismantling of nationalism and colonization. Two lives and two nations intersect in the space of a novel in which the processes of colonization and colonial mapmaking are challenged, attacked, and dismantled. Continuities begin to be affirmed even as nationalistic oppositions begin to disappear. In this final image of two lives intersecting again across the barriers of space and time, it is surely possible to find a synecdoche of the transformative capability which is manifest in cross-cultural relationships and in the affirmation of love, affection and affinities that transcend national boundaries as well as the conditions that define a divided and tumultuous world.

Younis, Raymond Aaron "". Literature Film Quarterly. 1998. FindArticles.com. 19 Aug. 2008.

THE ENGLISH PATIENT (book)

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September 4, 2002

The action takes place at the end of World War II, in an Italian villa in a hill town north of Florence. Hana, a nurse, has decided to stay behind with a severely burned patient when the rest of the military medical staff moved on. She has lost everyone to the war: her father, the man she loved and the child she was carrying. She takes care of the patient, faceless and nameless (he claims to have forgotten his name), in part because he helps her sink deeper into oblivion. She reads to this mysterious man who has already read a lot, speaks several languages and knows the location of the remotest places in the world. He even manages to identify the villa as having belonged to Poliziano, a friend of Pico della Mirandola, whose famous learning the English patient does not have to envy.

David Caravaggio, a thief who was a spy for the allies and had his thumbs chopped off by the Germans, hears about Hana’s whereabouts and comes to join her: he is an old friend of her father. He has his own ideas concerning the identity of the English patient and doesn’t believe him to be English, despite his impeccable accent. Addicted to morphine himself, he will use it on the patient to learn the truth about him…

Kip, a Sikh who defuses bombs that the Germans had left behind before their retreat, is also drawn to the villa and to Hana. Ties will evolve between these four people as they learn to discover themselves and one another. Along the way, the mystery surrounding the English patient is slowly unraveled…

The main theme of the novel is a reflection on identity: the English patient has to come to terms with his past and eventually accept who he is, Hana who has refused to look at herself in a mirror for a year, must rebuild her now rootless life, Caravaggio must redefine his personality, now that the tools of his trade have been damaged, and Kip, whose true name nobody remembers and whose biggest trial is yet to come, has to juggle his Indian heritage with his choice to serve the British Empire.

The originality of this novel is undeniably its style: oneiric, aesthetic, rich in metaphors and poetic sentences, it makes up for a sometimes slow-paced story. The evocation of the desert, where the English patient’s love story takes place in a series of flashbacks, is a powerful and ongoing metaphor for  forgetfulness, for memory erased. The sometimes fragmentary quality of the writing echoes the fragmentary knowledge we gain of the different protagonists, as the author lets us have insights into their consciousness. The English Patient is a book of fragments: fragments of memories, fragments of novels read to the English patient during his waking phases, fragments of his life pasted into his Herodotus’s Histories…

The English Patient displays four destinies forever changed and shattered by the war and shows that when everything has been taken away: family, love, face and name, what is left is the sum of experiences, of memories and the books read. Intertextuality is an important part of both the novel and the life of the English patient and in that respect, he is truly a literary character whose life can be read in masterpieces (Herodotus’s Histories, Anna Karenina…).

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Copyright 2007. Discussing Books. All rights reserved

Kelvin Ha 

BRIEF FLASHES OF LIGHTNING

The English Patient won Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian novelist and poet, the 1993 Booker Prize. It has since been made into an acclaimed film starring Ralph Fiennes, and that is probably why it is being reviewed here this week. When I first picked up the novel back in 1994, I couldn't get past the first ten pages because I found it very tedious and dry reading. The novel revolves around a foursome who somehow manage to converge in an Italian villa at the end of the Second World War, and I read only up to the melancholic descriptions of the nurse Hana as she potters about the villa tending to the mortally wounded English Patient.

When I heard that the book had been made into a film, I thought "How can they make a film out of such a boring novel? It's the only book, next to Mrs. Dalloway, that can put me to sleep. Eager to find out how Hollywood could find a story in this book, I picked it up again and this time concentrated on finishing it.

After getting to the part where I stopped the last time, I started regretting ever having put the book down the first time around. It is a very rich novel, very stylistically written, about the lives of four individuals whose lives have been damaged by the war. There is the nurse, Hana, who has lost her father and lover in the war and is so immune to death that she fears she has lost the capacity to feel. She walks around the villa like an empty shell tending to the mysterious patient who has been badly burnt beyond recognition in a plane crash in the Libyan desert.

Everyone assumes he is an Englishman because of his speech and mannerisms, and it is probably his story which provides the script for the film. Then there is the former thief, Caravaggio, who has lost his thumbs during the war and cannot steal anymore. The only thing he can do is come to the villa to find Hana, his friend's daughter whom he knew back in Canada before the war, and try to reimagine himself. Stumbling upon them is the Sikh sapper, Kip, who has lost himself fighting the war in the uniform of his imperial masters. Through his interactions and affairs with them, he comes to see who he is. However, to reveal how the novel unfolds at this point would be grossly unfair to it’s potential readers who might want to pick up the novel before they see the film.

This is a novel of revelation, and just as the identity of the English patient is slowly revealed as the novel progresses, so too are the inner selves and spiritual identities of the other characters in the novels. Ondaatje writes his novel of discovery very much in the manner of Virgina Woolfe, revealing things only briefly, like "flashes of lightning." Indeed, lightning abounds in this novel, lighting up the dark and melancholic landscape for a very brief period, but long enough to reveal hints of the truth.

The truth, however, is never be fully known in this novel. Surrounding these flashes of lightning is a heavy and dreary darkness in which the characters navigate, trying to find themselves and others. It is almost as if the novel is an exploration of the way we understand things and discover the truth. People are always meeting in the dark, and the only way we can know them is through casual, occasional bumps in that darkness and through brief flashes of light. Here Ondaatje borrows from Woolfe, but in his own way, Ondaatje has written a masterpiece which I had impatiently dismissed two years ago. If only I had been more patient, I would have enjoyed this beautiful novel much earlier.

THE FLYING INKPOT - http://inkpot.com/books/english.html

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