Perpetual Past and Present

Michael Ondaatje takes the liberty of narrating The English Patient in different tenses by alternating between the past and the present, with graceful transitions from the current moment to flashbacks. Depicting the real action and memories that accompany anyone’s life, Ondaatje's uses tense to create the illusion of a continuous reality, a past that is inseparable from the present.
The English patient has always been highly aware of the past and strongly connected to it. Even before his accident, he had chosen a profession that would allow him to immerse himself in something great and immortal, something where money and power were only fleeting constructs. Almásy's enduring spirit elevates his status as a critical character who serves as a link between two different realities. He affirms, “I have always had information like a sea in me. I am a person who if left alone in someone’s home walks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us” (pg. 18). Since his entire career has consisted of searching for ancient cities and mapping empty land, Almásy thus conjoins the past and the present, writing in the margins of Herodotus’s The Histories to account what he sees as the truths of the landscape.
The English patient also makes a habit of gluing maps or news clippings over “what had seemed lie[s]” (pg. 246) in the Herodotus book, which therefore becomes more than just ancient history. As contemporary literature, it details Almásy's own affair with the desert, demonstrating that history is not a static concept, but rather a shifting force that can be related to the present. In writing over the words of Herodotus, Almásy is literally rewriting history, choosing his perception of reality over that of the Father of History. Throughout the coarse of the novel, Ondaatje additionally threads quotes by the historian into his own text, elucidating how the past is the only thing the English patient has left in his life.
While Hana, Caravaggio, and Kip listen to Almásy's stories, they begin to understand them in light of the situation by drawing parallels to their own lives. The illicit nature of the patient's love affair is mirrored in Hana's relationship with Kip and creates a larger picture of love in war. Concepts such as warfare and reality are arbitrary and unstable in the novel, and are mirrored by the fluctuating modes of narration that juxtapose past and present. Ondaatje employs the fluidity of time as a device to interrelate memories and past decades, suggesting what the future may hold.