The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje

Philip Michael Ondaatje (born 12 Sep. 1943): Born in Ceylon to a Burgher* (see Note in the

next page) family of Dutch-Tamil-Sinhalese-Portuguese origin, in 1954 moved to England with his mother.

Became a Canadian citizen in 1962. Received his BA from the University of Toront

o and his MA from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario

Note

*The Burghers are a Eurasian ethnic group, historically from Sri Lanka, consisting for the most part of male-line descendants of European colonists from the 16th to 20th centuries (mostly Portuguese, Dutch and British) and local Sinhalese women.

Michael Ondaatje

Teaching: University western Ontario in London, Ontario; 1971-1988, York University and Glendon College in Toronto.

Style of fiction: non-liner, creating a narrative by exploring many interconnected snapshopts in great detail.

Michael Ondaatje

Works in other genres: Memoir: Running in the Family (his Sri Lan

kan childhood) Poetry: The Collected Works of Billy and th

e Kid (1970); There’s a trick With a Knife I’m Learning to do: Poems 1973-1978 (1979); both won the Governor General’s Award

Michael Ondaatje

Fiction: Anil's Ghost — winner of the 2000 Giller Prize, the Prix

Médicis, the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, the 2001 Irish Times International Fiction Prize and Canada's Governor General's Award.

The English Patient — winner of the Booker Prize, the Canada Australia Prize, and the Canadian Governor General's Award and later made into a motion picture, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture. The English Patient can be considered a sequel to In the Skin of a Lion (1987).

Michael Ondaatje

Fiction In the Skin of a Lion — winner of the 1988

City of Toronto Book Award and finalist for the 1987 Ritz Paris Hemingway Award for best novel of the year in English. It was selected for the first "Canada Reads" edition in 2002. A fictional story about early immigrant settlers in Toronto, In the Skin of a Lion eventually won the competition.

Coming Through Slaughter — a fictional story of New Orleans, Louisiana about 1900, very loosely based on the lives of jazz pioneer Buddy Bolden and photographer E. J. Bellocq. Winner of the 1976 Books in Canada First Novel Award

Michael Ondaatje

In 1988, was made an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC) and two years later became a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Brother: Christopher Ondaatje, a philanthropist and businessman.

The English Patient

A 1992 novel by Sri Lankan Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje

A story about the gradually revealed histories of a critically burned man, his Canadian nurse, a Canadian thief, and an Indian sapper in the British Army as they live out the end of World War II in an Italian villa

The English Patient

Plot summary: (see the handouts) Characters: Almasy/the English Patient: 1. A slippery, cryptic character, not adept at sel

f-examination. 2. Lacking any identification, serving a sort of

blank canvas onto which the other characters project their wishes (healing wounds).

The English Patient

Characters: Almasy: 3. An Hungarian not an English (irony) 4. Rejecting nationalism, so can be forgiven

for his actions (e.g., helping a German spy across the desert)

The English Patient

Characters: Hana: entirely paradoxical 1. Internal wound: losing her father to an ac

cident where he was burned beyond recognition; lover killed;

2. Young: 20 years old; playing hopscotch I the villa and seeing the patient as a noble hero who is suffering.

The English Patient

Characters Hana: 3. Mature: treating patients but immediately d

etaching from them once they are dead; Having a particular affinity for death.

4. Chaining herself to the English patient for atonement; seeing Almasy as saintlike and with the “hipbones of Christ”; falling in love with him in a purely non-sexual way,

The English Patient

Characters: Hana: projecting her own romanticized images onto t

he blank slate of the patient, forming a sort of fairytale existence for herself.

5. Falling in love with Kip; Almasy urges her to find that fire (of love) within and to kindle it.

The English Patient

Characters Kip: the most conflicted character,

uncomfortable with his own race and being part of a culture that was subservient to the British

1. Internal wound: Lord Suffolk’s death 2. Emotionally withdrawing: racial

discrimination

The English Patient

Character Kip: 3. Regaining confidence and a sense of com

munity (Hana) 4. Choosing to leave after the dropping of th

e atom bomb on Japan (escaping? Emotionally withdrawal again? Or having seen through the reality?)

The English Patient

Characters Caravaggio: 1. A Canadian thief and long-time friend of Ha

na’s father. 2. Two thumbs amputated, making him lose his

nerve (not capable of stealing, physically and mentally)

3. Coming to the villa to try to get Hana to leave, but eventually falling in love with her

The English Patient

Characters Katharine: 1. An Oxford-educated firebrand 2. Stubborn and feisty 3. The figure who leads Almasy to sensualit

y (reading Herodotus) 4. Breaking off the affair: sense of guilty an

d Almasy’s dislike of being owned

The English Patient

Major themes: 1. Healing vs. denial 2. Passion vs. frigidity: 3. Drive towards life vs. drive towards death 4. The desert 5. Loneliness vs. connection 6. Surrogate parents 7. debt