Mirrors of Life

Books function as a portal into another world, a way to see reality in a different light. Michael Ondaatje’s various characters dive into their respective literary journeys with anticipation and fervor, offering them the prospect of escape and knowledge. As Katharine reads voraciously to learn all she can about the desert, both Hana and the English patient find solace in the stories they read, fleeing from the present and falling “upon books as the only door out of [their] cell[s]” (pg. 7). Plunging into a parallel reality, the readers often become a part of the world they are reading. In fact, the English patient falls in love with the voice of Katharine as she tells the story of Candaules and Gyges from The Histories, which acts as catalyst for their love affair. In addition to conveying the power of words and behaving as an instrument of emotion, this intertextuality entwines the events of the novel with the narratives of the past, as if the same stories of love and jealousy are constantly being retold and are responsible for the creation of new ones. While Hana discloses her feelings on the blank pages of the villa’s books and the English patient writes out his love for Katharine in the margins of The Histories, Ondaatje mimics his characters’ actions by quoting endlessly from other texts, such as Kim, The Charterhouse of Parma, Anals, The Last of the Mohican, and Paradise Lost.

The recurring references to other works connect the past with the present, and the characters of The English Patient turn to books to give them information about the world and themselves. Almásy’s Herodotus book is a prized possession, not only serving a functional use as a guide to his searches in the desert, but also relaying stories that give insights into human existence. Larger than life, Almásy gives a voice to the entire tradition of European geographical discoveries since Herodotus, as physical location has become primary to his sense of being in the world. For Almásy, Herodotus did not simply tell of the past, but “the histories in Herodotus clarified all societies.” (150). As the first historian of the ancient world, Herodotus understood the lore of the desert and explored the enmity between the East and West, claiming the two could never be reconciled and suggesting the permanence of war in human history.