In the Skin of a Lion

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In the Skin of a Lion

Historical Obliviousness in Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion

Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion narrates the forgotten stories of those who contributed to the building of the city Toronto, particularly immigrants and marginal individuals. In the very first page of the novel, Ondaatje stresses the concern with personal narratives and the act of storytelling: "This is the story a young girl gathers in a car during the early hours of the morning [...] She listens to the man as he picks up and brings together various corners of the story..." (4). Similar to Crossing the River, there is a framework story, that of a man telling a story to a girl, that opens and ends the novel and gives coherence to the many personal narratives. Patrick has an audience at two narrative levels, namely, Hanna at the textual level and the reader at the extra textual one. The reader is the recipient of the macro story, which is Patrick's act of storytelling, as well as of the micro stories contained in it.

Like Phillips' novel, Ondaatje's has a circular quality that makes stories transcend time and space; In the Skin of the Lion ends where it starts. The structure of the novel resembles a Chinese box since a series of interrelated stories form concentric circles, all of which converge in Patrick's act of telling a story to Hanna.

He saw himself gazing at so many stories [...] He saw the interactions, saw how each one of them was carried by the strength of something more than themselves [...] His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw the wondrous night web --all these fragments of a human order... (145)

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In the Skin of a Lion creates an intimate space where the silenced, marginal and ex-centric author and tell their own stories. Ondaatje's characters comprise a polyphony of voices; even if not all the characters are narrators of their own stories, the reader gets to know their perspectives. He/she has access to the psychic and spiritual life of most of them mainly through Patrick Lewe's story and through a third person narrator. The stories are fragmented and somehow indeterminate. There are many silences and absences that call for an active participation on the part of the reader who tries to put the pieces of the puzzle together. As in Phillips' novel, the privileging of fragmented plural perspectives is an effort to avoid the closure and totalisation

that characterise master narratives and celebrate the openness and heterogeneity of human experience.

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