The English Patient

A young Canadian nurse, a Sikh bomb disposal expert, a thief turned spy, and a man burnt beyond recognition, meet in the last moments of the Second World War. The identity of the patient is the heart of the story as he tells his memories of a doomed love affair in the North African desert. Love and passion are set against the devastation of war in this inspired novel by Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje.

It is a novel of revelation, and just as the identity of the English patient is slowly revealed as the novel progresses, so are the inner selves and spiritual identities of the other characters in the novel. Ondaatje writes his novel of discovery revealing things only briefly and subtile. Indeed, such brief moments 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 fully known in this novel. 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.

The aim of this paper is to show the slow development

of the recognition of the charactersÒ' identities with all itÒ's frustrating, thrilling and surprising "truths" by pointing out several important and significant passages. All the characters are governed by questions of nation, language and identity; all are joined by their sense of being illegitimate, in flight from patriarchy and imperial-nationalist identity. The four main characters of the book - Hana, Caravaggio, The English Patient (Almбsy), and Kip - each have their own story to tell. Their plots intersect with each other, often without clearly explaining why.

I will start with a general overview of the main characters and put special attention on their identical background and misery, which each of them gives away just gradually along the chapters. Later on I will go more into detail and explore the function and the interpersonal relationship of the mysterious identity of the English patient not only as a character but a general metaphor for mankind.

Finally I will draw a conclusion and present my invastigations made in this seminar paper. With this paper I hope to show clearly that the contents of this book are strongly related to the question of the self and the other and that identifying truth is a matter of self-finding, which sometimes turns out to be work for a lifetime and which seems to roll up mankind.

The term "identity"

In general we differentiate between two "kinds" of identity. On the one hand there is the so called social identity, which stresses self-interpretation as a member of a certain social group and on the other hand there is the personal identity, which puts itÒ's emphasis on individuality and distinctiveness. This distinction is widely known as "patchwork-identity". Both identities are only a subgroup of many different subjectively interpreted identities that everyone of us has innate.

"Life is made up of many windows and real life is only one of them."

The question is, which of these identities will I present, which of them will I develop and how do I realize other personsÒ' identities? In the novel "The English patient" both of the above mentioned identities can be discovered within all the expressingly dynamic characters. If we take Hana as a first example we might simply say that she is a canadian nurse aiding injured soldiers during the second world war. This statement can be referred to as social identity - it is the way Hana behaves within society. Her personal identity, however, is much more subtile and not that easy, neither to discover, nor to understand. The same, of course, applies to the other characters, especially to the English patient, whose rediscovery of identity is the focus of this novel and mainly dealt with. His story of identical background is told in flashbacks, as he has lost his memory after an air crash in the middle of the Sahara and afterwards only gradually regains his mind again. While he desperately makes an effort to remember everything, Hana and Caravaggio had better forget their past. The young nurse admires her patient, although she does not know anything about him - where he may come from, what his name is, who he actually is - he has no identity. For her, the english patient is a ghost she is in love with, because his spiritual charisma keeps her alive after she has lost her family and friends.

2) The Characters from the beginning on

a) Hana in the focus

The book begins with pages and pages of description of an unnamed character, a woman who lives in an Italian deserted building, caring for a burnt man, we also do not know yet. We finally learn, on page 32, that her name is Hana, the 20-year-old nurse. Hana seems selfless, practicing just a series of devoted actions. The young nurse, without an explained past, performs her nursing tasks on this dying man without an apparent physical or historical identity in such an emational way that the reader may come to the conclusion that the patient might be a very good friend of hers: "I love him. He is a saint. I think. A despairing saint. Our desire is to protect them." (p.48) Later on we learn that her beloved father and her boyfriend, both, have recently been killed in the war, and now the solitude and passion for her patient helps her to deal with their death. Moreover, Hana was pregnant and has recently had an abortion (p.83) and now feels she destroyed the child. She strongly believes that a curse lies on her and her consuming love means death because everyone she loves dies. She cuts off all her hair, discards her femininity in grief. She longs to perform acts of reparation by nursing the English patient, who is described as the ghost she is caring for (p.28).

The Allies are moving up the ankle of Italy and the Germans are in retreat. Hana has found a beautiful Italian villa in which she can take care of the skinless man and embellish his last days, as he obviously does not have enough strength

to care for himself. Through burnt lips her nameless patient begins to speak. This is the point where memories start to return and gradually he reveals his identity like a mosaic built of thousands of little stones that slowly become a picture. He remembers his accident, which arouses our sympathy for him as a victim, and next that he was an idealistic explorer seeking to document the desert, and find a lost ancient city, near where there had been a lake in the midst of what is now desert.