Personality And Individuality In Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient

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Recommended: Nationalism after ww 1

Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient shows characters whose concept of identity is one that is based on personality and individuality instead of race and religion. The four characters all of different national backgrounds, come from different places and have wounds to heal from the war, but together they interact and form relations similar to those of a family. Similar to Ondaatje, who found a new home in Canada, the characters are in search for a home for themselves in a distant place which is also damaged by war. Ondaatje’s criticism of nationalism is shown by the effects of war and by using the desert as a metaphor of transience in that it cannot be claimed or defined, to underscore that all concepts of difference, borders and places on maps are all artificial and are in essence destructive.

identities
The characters create their identities in their attempts to escape from their names, bodies, and nationalities. The permeability of borders is depicted in the charred blackness of the English patient’s flesh. His burned skin, an indicator of race and vague memory allow him to escape the bounds of his name and race. “He rambled on, driving them mad, traitor or ally, leaving them never quite sure who he was” (Ondaatje 96). Accordingly, he attains the freedom of transcending borders and even ethnicity.

The English Patient notes that “we are communal histories, communal books”, which suggests the body resembles a text and ascribes to it the ability to be deconstructed, revised and amended. The English patient notes, “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" (Ondaatje 261). He wonders if he is "just a book to ...

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...n these aspects it echoes the idea that the villa, besides being a bombed ruin, is not only a place of healing, but also spiritual enlightenment.

Both texts show the European's disregard and disdain for cultures other than their own; a sentiment foregrounded in the novel when the two cities of Japan are destroyed and Kip and Caravaggio agree that such an act would not have been carried out on a white race.

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Ondaatje’s The English Patient questions nationalism and nations which are portrayed as imaginary and racist, causing the destruction of civilizations and suffering to all characters in the novel, specifically Almasy, Caravaggio, Hana and Kip. Likewise, the theme of national identity and narration of history are also explored as components of nationalism revealing the fact that neither national nor cultural identities are not stable or fixed, but elusive.

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