The English Patient Essay
Jaimes Alfredo
The English Patient
The English Patient is a novel written in 1992 by Sri Lankan-Canadian Michael Ondaatje, whose novel won the Booker Prize for best novel of 1992 and was adapted into an award-winning film in 1996. This book was written in a non-linear narrative, so that it provides the reader a different way to go through the reading of a novel, and which sometimes creates dynamism in the novel narrative, but also it could create confusion in the reader. «The story tells about nationhood, identity, and displacement» (Gale, 2006), but also explores loneliness, and life and death; these are linked themes in the novel, and also are the points to be analyzed in the following essay.
There are four main characters, whose names are: Hana, a Word-War-II nurse that “searches death” and takes care of the English Patient; Kip, an Indian young who works for the British army as a sapper and also defusing bombs; Almasy, the English Patient who burned his body in a flight crash, and whose identity is a mystery at the beginning of the novel; and Carvaggio, a middle-age Canadian who was a professional burglar, and who worked for the allies, he got his thumbs got when captured by the German forces.
Thus, these four lives are linked in a small Italian village where Hana decided to stay in order to take care of the English Patient; and where Kip joined the allies and met Hana. Also Carvaggio went to that village when he heard that Hana, his old friend´s daughter, was living there. All of them arrived to the village seemly emotionally and physically wounded, but overall, they were lone.
Hana, for instance, looks forward death, so she decides to stay in the village which she knew it was dangerous because of the war; also she tries to cover her pain by healing the English Patient, and by feeling that, yet, somebody needs her. But she is not the only in doing so, also Carvaggio went to the village because he knew that Hana was there, and because in a way he
The English Patient
The English Patient is a novel written in 1992 by Sri Lankan-Canadian Michael Ondaatje, whose novel won the Booker Prize for best novel of 1992 and was adapted into an award-winning film in 1996. This book was written in a non-linear narrative, so that it provides the reader a different way to go through the reading of a novel, and which sometimes creates dynamism in the novel narrative, but also it could create confusion in the reader. «The story tells about nationhood, identity, and displacement» (Gale, 2006), but also explores loneliness, and life and death; these are linked themes in the novel, and also are the points to be analyzed in the following essay.
There are four main characters, whose names are: Hana, a Word-War-II nurse that “searches death” and takes care of the English Patient; Kip, an Indian young who works for the British army as a sapper and also defusing bombs; Almasy, the English Patient who burned his body in a flight crash, and whose identity is a mystery at the beginning of the novel; and Carvaggio, a middle-age Canadian who was a professional burglar, and who worked for the allies, he got his thumbs got when captured by the German forces.
Thus, these four lives are linked in a small Italian village where Hana decided to stay in order to take care of the English Patient; and where Kip joined the allies and met Hana. Also Carvaggio went to that village when he heard that Hana, his old friend´s daughter, was living there. All of them arrived to the village seemly emotionally and physically wounded, but overall, they were lone.
Hana, for instance, looks forward death, so she decides to stay in the village which she knew it was dangerous because of the war; also she tries to cover her pain by healing the English Patient, and by feeling that, yet, somebody needs her. But she is not the only in doing so, also Carvaggio went to the village because he knew that Hana was there, and because in a way he