The English Patient

Introduction

In our lives, during the period of academic life and sometimes just for the sake of pleasure we read a lot of books. These books and novels provide us with pleasure, knowledge and information. The aim and purpose of this essay is also to undertake the discussion about one of the novels from a particular perspective. For that purpose the novel that is chosen is “The English Patient” by Michael Ondaatje.

Michael Ondaatje is a Sri Lanka-born novelist who lives in Canada. He is a writer, consequently, whose work writhes with the tensions inherent among races, cultures, and nationalities. Personal and political histories are Ondaatje's concerns, particularly as they intertwine and work to shape the emerging individual consciousness. In The English Patient, which shared the 1992 Booker Prize with Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger, Ondaatje multiplies these histories and makes of his novel a four-stranded narrative that moves between love story, history, and mystery. Any story of love involves itself naturally in mystery, and Ondaatje here deftly takes his reader in and out of the often dark and crossing passages of his characters' lives. The aim of this essay is to talk about the story of the novel and mention the presence of elements of history, love and mystery. Ondaatje is both a poet and a novelist. The English Patient combines the best of both genres: It has a very powerful, elegiac, lyrical, imagistic, and romantic quality, and it also has a very strong sense of narrative setting (historical, geographical, artistic, and architectural) and plot that shows the elements of mystery, love and history.

Discussion

In addition, Ondaatje skillfully weaves into his story an inter-textuality that blurs genres and texts. He includes direct quotations from bomb manuals, historical sources, British Geographical Society meeting minutes, popular songs, poems, letters, and other novels. From the beginning to the end these elements of history, mystery and love is present. The physical locus of this narrative is the Villa San Girolamo, a former nunnery set in the hills of Tuscany north of Florence. Once occupied by the Germans, the battle-ravaged villa more recently has served as an Allied field hospital. With the war in Italy near its end, the hospital has been abandoned, except for a patient, the English patient and a Canadian nurse, Hana, who has refused to evacuate the villa with the rest of the hospital staff. Here, the settings suggest the presence of element of history. The act of refusal of the English patient and Canadian nurse suggests the presence of the element of love (Los Angeles Times, pp. 3).

The dramatic locus of this narrative begins in the exchange of stories between these two figures. Each possesses a private history that demands slow and significant telling, and Ondaatje gives them time at the start of his novel to begin those telling. These stories take the reader back in time and move about in space; they are effective and sometimes inaccurate histories (Friedman, pp. 47).

The element of mystery can be proved by the ...