Belonging in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the characters’ sense of belonging in the novel The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje. The idea is that the characters all have a sense of belonging before they arrive at the Villa San Girolamo. This belonging, though, is wounded and they are all in need of healing. The healing process seems to start as they relate to each other in the villa and begin to form new ties. However, this new belonging is not strong enough to uphold relations after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings in the end result in a re-establishing of most of the characters’ original belonging to their nations or home countries. For a while, the novel communicates the idea of a form of global belonging, with the villa as a microcosm. This type of belonging seems to imply an imagined global community. The thesis asks how the characters’ sense of belonging is problematized in the novel and how this problematizing affects the various levels of community.