A theatre of expressions : narrative remaking of identities in Michael Ondaatje’s The English patient

Abstract

The aim for my thesis has been to justify the claim I am making, that the narrative techniques employed in Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient reflect sensations of fragmentation, alienation, and loss of the sense of self in the characters. The thesis sets out to examine different narrative devices, which emphasise these claimed feelings of altered and disrupted human identity. I discuss the characters’ identities both as individuals, and as representatives of their national and cultural backgrounds. Chapter one analyses the narrative structure, more specifically the shifts in time, tempo, focalisation, and characterisation. In chapter two, the analysis focuses on how physical scars can be read as a description of irrevocable, lasting change in each character’s perception of self. Scars are discussed both as a breach between the past and the present, and as a picture of healing and survival. The third chapter discusses how home and nation, mapping, and naming are central to the understanding of how the characters place themselves within a larger context. Through yearning to go home, or rejection of the concept of nations, the characters reflect a variety of responses to the ideal of belonging within a cultural or national sphere. As with the narrative structure and the scars, the desired return to one’s point of origin forms a picture of tension between ideal and reality in the acceptance of lasting alteration and the desire for unity.