Eric Abarca's Mini Essays

Number 1

“The desert could not be claimed or owned - it was a piece of cloth carried by winds, never held down by stones, and given a hundred shifting names before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East?. All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into landscape.”


The passage said by Almásy in Chapter IV is describing the way he feels about the desert and what he thinks the desert is. For Almásy the desert is not only a place that is dead and desolate, but it has characteristics and attributes of an entirely different entity. Through the desert Almásy feels connected to the people who had lived and been in the desert before him. Almásy knows that the feelings he has about “his” desert someone else in history felt the exact same feeling toward the desert he loves and adores. One of the attributes the desert has that make it fascinating is that it cannot be claimed or owned by anyone. Through the years people have claimed it as theirs, but Almásy sees that as an idiotic dream of rulers and kings because it is so vast and full of mystery that a person could never claim something like the desert.


Number 2

The symbol of the atomic bomb in The English Patient represents the real world of war the characters in the novel are living in. The people of the novel seem like they are “hiding” from war in the small Italian villa with the English patient, Almásy. The characters of the novel want to “get away” from the world they are living in currently by listening to the patient’s stories of the past and that enables them to leave the present situation they are in. Once the atomic bomb is reinstated in the minds of the characters they reawaken to the reality of what is happening around the Italian villa in the hills. The atomic bomb reminds the characters that are hiding in the small villa is an absurdity because the villa is in an open area that is able to be hit by any attacks. The atomic bomb serves as a symbol in the novel The English Patient because it represents something else in the novel and in the case of the characters hiding away in the small Italian villa the atomic bomb is the real world they are hiding away from because they do not want to be reminded of the horrors of war.

Number 3
The protagonist of the novel The English Patient is the patient, Almásy. Almásy is the protagonist of the novel because the drama of the novel is always surrounding him. Throughout the novel the English patient’s identity is revealed little by little, until Chapter IX when his name is revealed and his real background. On page 244 in the novel the patient says the name Almásy, but everyone does not know that the patient is the man named Almásy. Learning the english patient’s real name and his ethnicity is ironic because he is not English, but he is Hungarian and a “international bastard” who has been living in the desert for the majority of his adult life. The English patient serves to show the difference imagination and reality in the novel because he helps the other characters in the villa imagine things, so they can be able to escape the reality of war and the bad things happening to them. The English patient’s career was to search for ancient cities and mapping empty land, so he links the present to the past. Almásy's repeating connection between the past and present is what makes him “the English patient” in our minds. The English patient is undoubtedly always in our minds as we read the novel because he is always a part of the novel, which makes him the protagonist of the novel.

Number 4
One of the novel’s motifs is reading. Reading is a motif in The English Patient because it recurs throughout the novel. Hana reads to the English patient, Katherine reads all about Cairo and the desert, and Almásy reads The Histories by Herodotus. The characters seem to read for more knowledge and to be able to put themselves in another period of time in history or in another place. Reading in the novel is a metaphor for reaching beyond oneself to connect with others because each person that reads is trying to put themselves in another place that involves the person being read about. The way the characters in the novel interact with books create various interactions between persons and objects, like the way the people in the small Italian villa react about the atomic bomb.