The English Patient: A verbal Collage

The Novel VS. The Movie--
In Ondaatje’s novel The English Patient Hana’s character appears to be withdrawn, holding back her past, feelings and motivation. We are forced to read much of the novel questioning why it is she cares so much for the English Patient? Why is it she stays behind in villa filled with hidden, undetonated bombs with a man she doesn’t know? What is it that causes her to feel attached? Although in the film adaptation by Anthony Minghella, Hana comes to believe she is a curse whose friends inevitably die. In one of the first scenes Hana loses one of her fellow nurses to an atomic bomb explosion and thus reveals her feelings. The novel seems to be more set in the present day, following more of the interactions between the patient, Hana and Kip; while the movies focus more on the crash of the patient and his relationship with Katherine. I felt that the movie failed to send the tone that Ondaatje intended to send by referencing back to the past.


One Great Passage--
“…They were protected by the simple fact that the villa seemed a ruin. But she felt safe here, half adult and half child. Coming out of what and happened to her during the war, she drew her own rules to herself. She would not be ordered again or carry out duties for the greater good. She would care only for the burned patient…”

In this passage we see firsthand the effects the war has had on Hana, forcing her to grow up quickly after leaving home at only eighteen. Witnessing death has stripped her of a part of her adolescence and childhood. This abandoned villa gives her a chance to start anew. To her it serves as another worldly place, as though civilization is starting over and she can make her own rules. In this passage Hana is catch between childhood and adulthood, between playing hopscotch in the night and washing the wounds of the English Patient. During the war she always listened to the chain of command, never doing as she wanted. Here she is really able to make her own rules, if she prefers to sleep in a new room each night she can. Hana puts all her energy into caring for the burn patient as a way to escape her own emotional struggles. As the novel concludes, Hana sees the reality in her situation, and she longs to return home to the safety of Clara and her home. She wants that part of her life back that she lost when choosing to participate in the war.



Theme: Nationality and Identity
Nationality and identity are interconnected throughout The English Patient, functioning through people, settings and themes. The English Patient ultimately indistinguishable has lost his identity and nationality due to the burns. Hana struggles with whether to identify herself as a child or an adult. Kip flees England in attempt to escape race and nations, finding that it is an unavoidable idea. The desert, a place lacking borders, permanency, beholding nothing to leave your mark by, is the space where all nations intersect as result of the war, “ There were rivers of desert tribes…we were German, English, Hungarian, Africa- all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations. We are deformed by nation-states”(138). Ondaatje writes that war is what inevitably what kills and strips us our familiar identity and leave us only with a national one.


My Favorite Lines:
"... war has unbalanced him and he can return to no other world as he is, wearing these false limbs that morphine promises. He is a man in middle age who has never accustomed to families. All his life he had avoided permanent intimacy. Till this was he has been a better lover than a husband. He has been a man who slips, in the way lovers leave chaos, the way thieves reduce houses." p 116

I love these lines that Ondaatje writes about Carvaggio, showing that since the war he has never been able to be a productive member of society. It shows war has be a major cause of the thief's pain, not only physically but mentally and emotionally as well. He is unable to form any type of functioning relationship with another person without leaving before things got difficult. He turns to morphine as an escape of reality, a means to put off what he really needs to deal with. Ondaatje writes Cavarggio, "has been a better lover than a husband" referring that he is not the type of man who can stay faithful and steady with one women, but must never let himslef get to involved before war must take him away.