Ineludible Identity

In Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, identity is significantly correlated with nationality, creating a maze of inexorable structures that tie characters to certain places and situations despite their best efforts to evade such confinement. Almásy desperately tries to elude the forces of nationality by remaining in the desert where he crafts an alternate persona, one in which race and origins are immaterial. Rather than inheriting it, he forges this identity through his work and interactions with others, avoiding the horrors of war that have resulted from both nationalism and a sense of cultural distinctiveness. Shedding his national identity in the desert, he comes to realize the absurdity of patriotism and war, reflecting, “We were German, English, Hungarian, African - all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations” (pg. 138). Just as the desert functions as a place where nationality is irrelevant for Almásy, the isolated Italian villa serves the same purpose for Kip, who is able to dismiss his sensitivity to his own ethnic background for a period of time.
Surrounded by an encouraging Lord Suffolk and the hospitable inhabitants of the villa, Kip becomes enmeshed in Western society. The English patient, who is ironically Hungarian, even notes, “Kip and I are both international bastards – born in one place and choosing to live elsewhere. Fighting to get back to or get away from our homelands all our lives” (pg. 176). While Almásy and Kip escape their pasts and try to create identities based on ideals, they ultimately cannot evade the importance of nationality during wartime. When Almásy struggles to save Katharine from dying in the Cave of Swimmers, he is thrown in jail merely because his name sounds foreign. His identity follows him even after he is burned beyond recognition, as Caravaggio discovers that Almásy was an infamous spy who was aiding the Germans before his accident. For Kip, news of the atomic bomb reminds him that, outside the microcosmic world of the villa, Western aggression still exists. Though the villa’s inhabitants had remained with the English patient in order to avoid the war – immersing themselves in his world of the past rather than facing the problems of the present – the apocalyptic event of the atomic bomb rudely reawakens them, especially Kip, to the reality of the outside world where the power of nations is paramount. Terrified and infuriated, Kip confronts the English patient with his belief that the West would have never used such a weapon on a white race, demanding, “What have I been doing these last few years? Cutting away, defusing, limbs of evil. For what? For this to happen?” (pg. 284). This outburst signifies his despair over the beliefs and practices he had embraced, and marks his final acceptance of his race's subservient position in its colonial relationship with England.
Kip rejects his cultural persona, together with the name given to him by the English, and becomes Kirpal Singh once again. He leaves Italy “traveling against the direction of the invasion” (pg. 290), retracing his route away from Florence while consciously severing his ties to the culture that had engulfed him. He finally crashes his motorcycle on a bridge and is flung into a river – a metaphorical baptism that cleanses him from the past and leads him to renewal from the damaging effects of Western imperialism. Due to the power of preconceived ideas about civilization, people of different races and countries often have no choice but to endure their cultural inheritance, in time succumbing to its relentless grasp.