sunline press - roland leach

Herodotus The Histories, Kipling's Kim, Stendahl's The Charterhouse of Parma, Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohican, Milton's Paradise Lost, works of Christopher Smart, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, Aeneas, Odysseus, Savonarola (Bonfire of the Vanities), Lorenzo Medici, Queen of Sheba, Du Maurier's Rebecca, Caravaggio, Isaiah

***
The ideas of maps, borders, nationality are all artificial constructs that lead to dispossession, exploitation and war.

The novel is concerns with where stories come from and how they influence the present. Discuss the use of allusion and intertextuality in the light of This comment.

'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 long before Canterbury existed, long before battles and treaties quilted Europe and the East.'

Just as the original identity of a literary text is made up of the voices that came before, the concept of identity (individual and national) is shown in The English patient to be a construct.

Destroyed chapel 11
Ruins: ruins of the villa linked to the English patient ruined body ('he was a large animal in their presence, in near ruins 27)

Relationships, sense of our identity and ourselves in a ruined world, which apocalyptic future. Within villa they try to find who they are: EP remains unidentified, a person not wanting identiity or nationality; Hana is lost, wanting in the end the refuge of a tiny island in Canada with Clara; Kip realises how his identiity had been overlaid with the cultural map of Empire and rebels, returning to India as Kirpal Singh and Caravaggio, lost in morphine and without thumbs to do his art/trade dies. ??

NPOV

Fiction has often denied its own constructedness, passing off stories as 'slices of life' and characters as 'real people', and generally as reflections of the outside world. They are also presented seamlessly as if life flows this way. Of course texts are constructions and must select detail and present events and characters that are always arbitrary in nature. The modernist writers of the early twentieth century questioned the premise that people were 'knowable', and presented more complex versions of possible identities. Post-modern writers have gone further and have often called attention to the actual artifice of the story as well as knowing that all texts are informed by the existence of others (intertextuality), that all are constructs, and that our notion of identity as autonomous selves is mistaken.

The narrative point of view in The English Patient is used as a device to explore the concept of identity.

* texts that purport to 'reflect reality' and deny that they present values and only a version of the world are based on assumptions that propose that neutrality and objectivity is possible in texts and that ideology is a myth.

Post-modern texts often alert the reader to its own artificiality and that it is a 'construct' to highlight the idea it is a text that is presenting a version and a set of values, and reminding the reader that it is not a seamless portrayal of real life and human experiences but a specially selected version.

Mapping

The act of surveying, mapping and naming a place has greater significance than merely the geographical. By giving a place a name, the colonial namer asserts his own place in history, creates a place (metaphorical in the sense that a name becomes the thing ; transforming landscape into a European name).

The very act of naming was a way of bringing the landscape into existence (textual presence), of bringing it within the compass of a European rationality that made it at once familiar to its colonisers and alien to its native inhabitants. It allows for things then to take place: once something happens, events, then it can become history.

Names are not the 'thing'.

In Kipling's 'Kim' he explicitly acknowledges the importance of mapping for Britain's possession of India. Though on a spiritual journey with the Tibetan lama he is also committed to Colonel Creighton who is a military man but also an ethnographer. Imperialism colonises a land by imposing practices, ways of thinking and seeing, conceptual paradigms (even like the geographer with his classifications and generalisations about climate and geography). It is an act of expropriation

English Patient

1. Trope of Covering - mapping, imperialism, colonisation, act of expropriation - burnt skin/identity, nationalism.

intertextuality - herodotus, kim, charterhouse

symbolism - fire, religious

desert, fire, water, villa, imperialism/nationalism, layering, identity

1. The differences between the two love stories (Hana & Kip, EP & Katherine)

- while the latter is the more passionate love affair, the other is its counterpoint. Their relationship is marked by a refuge from the shell-shocked state of mind incurred by the horrors of war. It is a relationship of healing, redemption and transformation, revealing the personal changes wrought about by the impossibility of nationhood or devastating results brought about by imposed national affiliations. Hana is another victim of war, while Katherine was the epitome of womanhood.

2. The desert as metaphor. The image of the desert defies national identity, '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' (p.138) It disappears and reappears as a changed landscape and can only be defined by its indefinability. The desert refuses to be mapped, an activity that attempts to impose artificial borders and fabricated identities. The EP suggests it is therefore a place of freedom where artificial boundaries are shown as destructive: '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 ... Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert.' (139)

The symbolism of burned body. .

The end of the war in Europe represented the end of one era of imperialism - soon after dozens of third-world countries achieved their independence from their imperialist colonisers - and this end, this burnt-out case is embodied in the English patient. Significantly he carries with him the first narrative history of the world, Herodotus' Histories, which he turns into a 'commonplace book', inserting into it pages from other books or his own observations.

- hair

- images of permeability

Orals

1. The differences between the two love stories (Hana & Kip, EP & Katherine)
2. The symbolism of burned body.
3. Kip.
4. The Villa. Ruins, refuge from the outside world
5. The significance of the setting of Florence. Represents the apex of Western civilisation with its high art and culture.
6. The desert as metaphor.
7. The use of intertextual references.

- significance of the story of Candaules and Gyges

- Herodotus

- Kim

- biblical stories: David 94,

8. The palimpsest. 246
9. Symbolism of fire
10. Images of fire (97, 5, 175, scars, mutilated hands, bombs, warfare and healing
11. Religious symbolism
12. The significance of paintings: Isaiah (77-78, 294), David and Goliath (116-117)
13. The novel resists linearity and refuses closure and completeness.
14. Ondaatje uses the names of his characters at both the thematic and metafictional levels.
15.Kip can be seen as the subject becoming decolonised and the English patient symbolises a burnt-out imperialistic discourse.
16. Ondaatje shows the connections between texts, how they are created and conceived, as well as the way they contribute to an understanding of the novel through his use of allusion and intertextuality. Discuss.
17. The novel is a critique of the 'isms' (imperialism, colonialism, nationalism) that dominated the first half of the twentieth century. Discuss with close reference to The English Patient.

ghosts - 28, 45, 91

mutilated hands - 75

images of amputation - 41, 43

Possibilities for Journal

Research:

Characters
English patient: associated with fire, the desert, Herodotus

he is seen as a despairing saint, faceless and nameless, has a burnt body, a ghost

physically damaged

used for his knowledge of buried guns

like the sculpture of the dead knight in Ravenna (death pose)

he is a cultured man who loves to talk and display his knowledge. Words are important to him.

He is Goliath ( or the dead man) to Kip's David. Represents the old traditions, the coloniser who is metaphorically killed and the young non-European nations survive.

birds, hawk

Hana: a nurse who cares for the EP. She is also in need of healing as she is in shell-shock and has lost her father and had an abortion.

associated with - books, half-child who play game

cuts her hair and doesn't look at a mirror for a year

falls in love with Kim

The novel is a story about stories and the act of creating narratives.It is a story of love and desire; four damaged people in a villa who need healing; war and loss; the tyranny of imperialism, nationalism and colonialism; personal and national identity. On a metaphorical level it shows the demise of imperialist discourses and the rise of the oppressed and dispossessed indigenous populations.

imperialism, colonialism and nationalism (138- 139, 283-287, 290 )

- maps, borders, Kipling's Kim, war, bombing of Japan, cultural imperialism and oppression , image of palimpsest, metaphor of desert and garden, references to David and Goliath and Caravaggio's painting

Ondaatje's critique of imperialism, nationalism and colonialism is shown through four characters in a villa who have been damaged by war. The English patient and Caravaggio are physically injured, Hana is psychologically wounded by what she had seen in war as well as being shell-shocked, while Kip is damaged by the trauma of being a sapper, but later through the realisation that he had inadvertently supported a civilisation that had exploited and oppressed his own people and had been responsible for dropping a terrible weapon on a fellow-Asian country.

The very idea of nationalism with its jingoistic rhetoric of saving the world for civilisation is shown to be responsible for creating borders and divisions between people. It is the cause of most wars as it pits one nation against nation when really the differences have been constructed for other reasons, often economic and in the interests of those in power.

In the novel there are many references to maps and borders.

'All I desired was to walk upon such an earth that had no maps.' 261

The English patient after years in the desert came to see the absurdity of nationalism and war. In the desert these artificial borders were lost: 'We were German, Englsih, Hungarian, African - all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations.' (138) The novel uses the desert as a metaphor. The desert defies national identity, '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' (p.138) It disappears and reappears as a changed landscape and can only be defined by its indefinability. The desert refuses to be mapped, an activity that attempts to impose artificial borders and fabricated identities. The English patient suggests it is therefore a place of freedom where artificial boundaries are shown as destructive: 'All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished toremove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith ... Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert.' (139)

Ondaatje's critique of nationalism is shown by the terrible consequences of war and by using the desert as a metaphor to highlight that all notions of difference, the lines we draw on maps, the places we name are all artificial and are in essence destructive.

colonialism

'I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often, from your country. Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow convertedd the rest of the world. You stood for precise behaviour. I knew that if I lifted a teacup with the wrong finger I'd be banished.' 283

Kip is distraught by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He sees the 'streets of Asia full of fire.' and significantly he sees this in the image of the map (the coloniser's way of subjugating a nation), 'It rolls across cities like a burst map.' This was the culture that had proclaimed itself civilised and now sees the terrible hypocrisy, and sees it in the irony of 'This tremor of western wisdom' (284)

Kip had never believed in his brother's outward rebellion against his colonisers, and it is only after the bomb that he sees that his brother is right: 'My brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe. The deal makers. The contract makers. The map drawers.' 284

Individual books also are used symbolically in The English Patient to draw parallels between the two cultures. Kim sets up another level of meaning in relation to colonial dispossession and cultural imperialism that foreshadow Kip's realisation at the close of the novel. The Last of the Mohicans is another text written by a white man showing the dispossession and genocide of an Indian race. In both cases they show the European's disregard and disdain for cultures other than their own; a sentiment forgrounded in the novel when the two cities of Japan are destroyed and Kip and Caravaggio agree that this would not have happened if they were a white race.

Post-colonial reading

This reading foregrounds the the way non-Western nations had been colonised and dispossessed by European imperialism. The novel ends on the apocalyptic bomb dropped on Japan and Kip believing that the West would have never dropped an atomic bomb on a white race. Yet throughout the novel Kip is used to symbolise the colonised East and this is seen through the importance of his name and its link with Rudyard Kipling's Kim.

Kim is the most important intertext in the novel. Kipling represents the old traditional forces of imperialism, where the British colonised in the name of civilisation and dispossessed the Indians of their land and cultural heritage. Kip, unlike his brother, has accepted this and had become 'English' in many ways. His name Kirpal Singh is changed to 'Kip', which combines both 'Kim' and 'Kipling': the name of the character who models himself on both his Tibetan guru and his soldier-ethnographer mentor, Creighton. Ondaatje's Kip can be seen to represent the drama of the indigenous person becoming decolonised, as he rebels finally at the end seeing how he had been tricked, and the English patient being the burnt-out imperial discourse.

Kip recognises his own colonisation when he confronts the English patient with his belief that the West would never had used such a weapon on a white race.

'My brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe. The deal makers. The map drawers ... But we, oh, we were easily impressed - by speeches and medals and your ceremonies. What have I been doing these last few years? Cutting away, defusing, limbs of evil. For what? For this to happen? (284)

This outburst signifies Kip's despair over all the beliefs and practices he had embraced. It marks his final understanding of his race's subservient position in the colonial relationship and he renounces all the things that he thinks the English patient stands for. In some cases this is ironic and Kip is mistaken as the English patient is not English and he shuns nationalism, possessions and the things Kip equates with the English. However it is more as a symbol that he sees the English as and recognises how he had been made into an 'Englishman' in some of his earlier attitudes. More importantly Kip equates war on other non-European nations as a distinctly English trait ('American, French, I don't care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman ... You all learned it from the English' 286).

Kip also rejects the cultural map that had been drawn over his own, together with his name. This rejection is mapped out in Kip's leaving and retracing his route - 'travelling against the direction of the invasion' (290) - through Florence, Greve, Cortona, Arezzo, Sansepolcro and Gabicce Mare to Ortona. Through this he consciously sheds himself of the cultural heritage that had shaped and enveloped him. At the end the narrative finds him as Kirpal Singh in India, a country that had also become independent in 1947.

The devastated Europe in 1945 can also be seen in a post-colonial reading as an end of imperialism and the English patient, a burnt out case, symbolises the end of notions of cultural superiority and heroism. Significantly he always carries a copy of Herodotus' Histories, the first narrative history of the ancient world and one whose main theme was the enmity between East and West. He changes the nature of this history as he has turned it into a 'commonplace book', inserting into its text pages of other books and his own observations. This subversion of the authority of the text is also seen in the way he refutes the conventions of colonial mapping by recognising that the 'desert could not be claimed or owned' (138), and that it had existing, beautiful names over which no new ones should be inscribed.

The image of the palimpsest is repeatedly used to show how one text is buried by another or added to. This represents the way indigenous cultures have been mapped and written over by other dominant cultures. This has happened in history by colonial and imperialist forces who have dispossessed the indigenous people of their language and customs and replaced it with their own.

The relationship between colonised and coloniser seen in the references to David and Goliath and the painting by Caravaggio of the same name. These represent the old relationship of the old oppressor with seemingly invincible power (European imperialism) being slayed by the small and weak by (indigenous nations)

Civilisation has often been represented by the ordered garden that has tamed Nature, while the desert is represented as dry, infertile and unstable with its borders built on shifting sands. Significantly it is in the desert that fulfilment can be obtained and the destructive forces of nationalism are abandoned and seen for their divisive nature.

The English Patient

Chapter 1 The Villa

Hana and the English patient at the villa

- religious images (Christ, despairing saint, six foot crucifix as scarecrow

- symbolism of setting (villa)

- symbolism of books (Herodotus, Last of Mohicans, used to repair stairs

- symbolism of garden

- symbolism of fire

- symbolism of water

- images of maps and cartography

bombed chapel/Hana child-like/winds/mines/Ghost/guns

'I am a personwho if left alone in someone's homewalks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us. ' (18)

water in desert 'I must build a raft' 18 'Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth' (19)

'In the desert you celebrate nothing but water' (23)

narrative point of view

Chapter Two In Near Ruins

Caravaggio joins them at villa.

- symbolism of setting (villa) 'Some rooms are painted, each room has a different season (29) 'a room painted like a garden' (33) 'The villa San Girolamo, built to protect inhabitants from the flesh of the devil .. There seemed little demarcation betweemn house and landscaoe .. To Hana the wild gardens were like further rooms.' 43

Safety while outside there is danger and threat ("it is terrible out there .. People hanging upside down from bridges. The last vices of war. Completely unsafe ... mines 29 .. 'There are unexploded bombs all over the place' (32)

Significance of Caravaggio's name

'He was a large animal in their presence, in near ruins' (27)

bodies of characters in ruins paralleled to setting in villa

'Words are tricky things' (37)

'she had come across the English patient - soemone who looked like a burned animal, taut and dark, a pool for her' 41

death of Hana's father 41

'I love him ...He is a saint. I think. A despairing saint. Are there such things? Our desire is to protect him.' (45)

'All identification consumed in fire.' (48)

Learn about Caravaggio

Hana - tennis shoes, hammock and frock. Steals from teo dead men, sleeps 12 hours beside dead man. Then wakes and cuts her hair as it hadtouched blood in a wound. Constant presence of death.

'She never looked at herself in mirrors again.' (50). Shedding her old identity, not concerned with appearance. Nothing superflouos only what is never to live. 'She peered into her look, trying to recognise herself. (52)

Hana wants to forget her past, shed responsibility of adulthood: 'There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult.' (52)

EP tells history of the villa - Poliziano, Savonarola, Pico della Mirandola (frend who became a traitor) - his nickname was Pico.

Caravaggio tells of how he lost thumbs, thrown into a river on fire.

Hana writes of Caravaggio in 'The Last of the Mohicans'. (61)

Hana plays piano, two sappers appear.

Chapter Three Sometime a Fire

Kip arrives at the villa.

The narrator tells of the war in Italy in documentary fashion. Speaks of great art of cities.

Kip awed by the painting of Queen of Sheba ('The Queen of Sadness' 72, the 'guilty queen'70)

Takes medialist up to see the painting.

Kip appears as Hana plays piano

Isaiah (78) Virgin Mary . Both seen in gunsight.

Hana tells of abortion (82)

The indignity of dying. 'Every damn general should have had my job. Every damn general ... I could never believe in all those services they gave for the dead. Their vulgar rhetoric. How dare they? How dare they talk like that about a human being.' (84)

Kip's name ' the young Sikh had been thereby translated into a salty English fish' (87)

'A novel is a mirror walking down a road.' *91)

The importance of books. Throughout the novel Hana reads to the English patient books that echo thematic concerns that are explored in the novel (KIm, The Charterhouse of Parma. 93

'When she begins a book she enters through stilted doorways into large courtyards. (93)

Palimpsest. In Herodotus an extract from the Bible pasted in about King David 94

In herodotus' Histories, are other fragments - maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books. All that is missing is his own name.' 96

Entries about Katherine 1936 'the heart is an organ of fire.' 97

104 - 105 Kip sleeping next to statues, seeing himself within painting

Hana draws parallels with the relationship between Kip and EP with Kim and Indian guru and British Creighton 111

Caravaggio's painting of David with the Head of Goliath ... 'I think when I see him at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David.' 116

'But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for truth in others.' 117

Zam-Zammah cannon - colonialism and imperialism 118

'how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love 119

Tyranny of the powerful, rich and civilised 122-123. 'They have to protect their belongings. No one is meaner than the rich. Trust me. But they have to follow the rules of their shitty civilised world.'

Hana defends Kip (he believes in a civilised world. He's a civilised man.' (122) like a relic, another of her saints from a world that is no more.

Kip remains pure; he appears unaffected by the horrors of war at this stage. 'He has emerged from the fighting with a calm which, even if false, means order for him.' 126

IV South Cairo 1930-38

VI A Buried Plane

The significance of gardens. For Katherine, 'She spoke to me of her childhood gardens. When she couldn't sleep she drew her mother's garden for me ..' 161 It is through EP's knowledge of English gardens that helps him convince people he is english.

'But it is mostly the desert now. The English garden is wearing thin.' 161

Kip has been made over as an Englishman, colonised by their values. Kip's journey up through Italy as a sapper with the Allied invasion follows a route mapped by Ondaatje in terms of landmarks of Western European culture: in Rome Kip sees the prophet Isaiah in the Sistine Chapel; in Gabicce Mare he witnesses the Marine Festival of the Virgin Mary; and in Arezzo he is fascinated by Piero della Francesca's fresco of the Queen of Sheba conversing with King Soloman. Finally, he reaches Florence (the symbolic home of Western culture) and the Villa San Girolamo, which the English patient believes belonged to Poliziano ad is associated with the famous names of Lorenzo, Leonardo, Michelangelo and Botticelli - that group of people who at the end of the fifteenth century 'held in each hand the new world and the old world' (57)

After Kip hears of the atomic bombs on Japan he confronts the EP, rejecting the cultural discourses he represents and the ones Kip had internalised. He recogbnises his own colonisation by an essentially destructive and self-destructive force when he tells the EP that theWest would never have used such a weapon against a white race: 'My brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe ... For this to happen.' 284-5

This outburst shows Kip's despair over what he had embraced and he rejects the cultural map that has been drawn over his own, together with his name. He leaves 'travelling against the direction of the invasion' 290, retraces his route away from Florence, through Greve, Cortona, Arezzo, Sansepolcro and Gabicce Mare to Ortona, consciously dismantling the culture that had enveloped him. Finally falling into the water - a metaphorical baptism that allows him to shed himself from the past and be renewed. At the end, the narrative finds him some years later as Kirpal Singh in India, the country that had become independent in 1947.

West constructed as destructive; despite their so-called great civilisation (the wisdom, the artistic culture) they have been responsible for arrogantly exploiting and dispossessing other cultures of their language, customs and beliefs, imposing their own in the name of civilisation, yet really done for an imperialistic program to impose their values on others and to possess power.

The English Patient

Chapter 1 The Villa

Hana and the English patient at the villa

- religious images (Christ, despairing saint, six foot crucifix as scarecrow

- symbolism of setting (villa)

- symbolism of books (Herodotus, Last of Mohicans, used to repair stairs

- symbolism of garden

- symbolism of fire

- symbolism of water

- images of maps and cartography

bombed chapel/Hana child-like/winds/mines/Ghost/guns

'I am a personwho if left alone in someone's homewalks to the bookcase, pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enters us. ' (18)

water in desert 'I must build a raft' 18 'Water is the exile, carried back in cans and flasks, the ghost between your hands and your mouth' (19)

'In the desert you celebrate nothing but water' (23)

narrative point of view

Chapter Two In Near Ruins

Caravaggio joins them at villa.

Significance of Caravaggio's name

'He was a large animal in their presence, in near ruins' (27)

bodies of characters in ruins paralleled to setting in villa

'Words are tricky things' (37)

'she had come across the English patient - soemone who looked like a burned animal, taut and dark, a pool for her' 41

death of Hana's father 41

'I love him ...He is a saint. I think. A despairing saint. Are there such things? Our desire is to protect him.' (45)

'All identification consumed in fire.' (48)

Learn about Caravaggio

Hana - tennis shoes, hammock and frock. Steals from two dead men, sleeps 12 hours beside dead man. Then wakes and cuts her hair as it had touched blood in a wound. Constant presence of death.

'She never looked at herself in mirrors again.' (50). Shedding her old identity, not concerned with appearance. Nothing superflouos only what is needed to live. 'She peered into her look, trying to recognise herself. (52)

Hana wants to forget her past, shed responsibility of adulthood: 'There was something about him she wanted to learn, grow into, and hide in, where she could turn away from being an adult.' (52)

EP tells history of the villa - Poliziano, Savonarola, Pico della Mirandola (friend who became a traitor) - his nickname was Pico.

Caravaggio tells of how he lost thumbs, thrown into a river on fire.

Hana writes of Caravaggio in 'The Last of the Mohicans'. (61)

Hana plays piano, two sappers appear.

Chapter Three Sometime a Fire

Kip arrives at the villa.

The narrator tells of the war in Italy in documentary fashion. Speaks of great art of cities.

Kip awed by the painting of Queen of Sheba ('The Queen of Sadness' 72, the 'guilty queen'70)

Takes medialist up to see the painting.

Kip appears as Hana plays piano

Isaiah (78) Virgin Mary . Both seen in gunsight.

Hana tells of abortion (82)

Kip's name ' the young Sikh had been thereby translated into a salty English fish' (87)

'A novel is a mirror walking down a road.' *91)

The importance of books. Throughout the novel Hana reads to the English patient books that echo thematic concerns that are explored in the novel (KIm, The Charterhouse of Parma. 93

'When she begins a book she enters through stilted doorways into large courtyards. (93)

Palimpsest. In Herodotus an extract from the Bible pasted in about King David 94

In Herodotus' Histories, are other fragments - maps, diary entries, writings in many languages, paragraphs cut out of other books. All that is missing is his own name.' 96

Entries about Katherine 1936 'the heart is an organ of fire.' 97

104 - 105 Kip sleeping next to statues, seeing himself within painting

Hana draws parallels with the relationship between Kip and EP with Kim and Indian guru and British officer, Creighton 111

Caravaggio's painting of David with the Head of Goliath ... 'I think when I see him at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David.' 116

'But here they were shedding skins. They could imitate nothing but what they were. There was no defence but to look for truth in others.' 117

Zam-Zammah cannon - colonialism and imperialism 118

'how people betray each other for the sake of nations, how people fall in love 119

Hana defends Kip (he believes in a civilised world. He's a civilised man.' (122) like a relic, another of her saints from a world that is no more.

Kip remains pure; he appears unaffected by the horrors of war at this stage. 'He has emerged from the fighting with a calm which, even if false, means order for him.' 126

references to saints in novel relates to their purity of intention (Kip, Hana & EP)

'He (Kip) asks her why she cannot sleep. She lies there irritated at his self sufficiency, his ability to turn so easily from the world.' (128) After the bomb is dropped he loses this ability as he sees that he has cut himself off from the world and, in particular, his own people, and now takes action.

References to Hana's inability to sleep 128-130

Chapter IV South Cairo 1930-38 (tells of desert explorers of 1920's and 30's, English Patient tells of years in the desert, tells of Clifton and katherine's arrival)

EP tells of the spiritual, redemptive qualities of the desert; of the arbitrary nature of identity and nations. Both are destructive and create prejudice, discrimination and war. Maps and borders create these arbitrary divisions that in turn led to wars.

'We were German, English, Hungarian, African - all of us insignificant to them. Gradually we became nationless. I came to hate nations.' (138)

'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 ... All of us, even those with European homes and clothing in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith... Erase the family name! Erase nations! I was taught such things by the desert.' 138-139

'But I wanted to erase my name and the place I had come from. By the time war arrived, after ten years in the desert, it was easy for me to slip across borders, to any nation.' 139

Katherine reads from Milton's Paradise Lost. 'That night I fell in love with a voice.' 144

Katherine (tells of how they fell in love)

she hates a 'lie', EP hates 'ownership' 152

Katherine is aligned with water and gardens. 'She is happiest here. She is a woman who misses moisture, who always loved low green hedges and ferns.' 153

Violence in their love relationship.

VI A Buried Plane (Cairo in 1936 K & EP, shifts to villa where caravaggio tells Hana of his belief that EP is Almasy, C gives EP a Brompton cocktail to force him to tell more, narrator starts to tell of EP return to Cave of Swimmers in 1942 then shifts to EP telling Caravaggio in first person

'But it is mostly the desert now. The English garden is wearing thin.' 161

'But she was a woman who had grown up within gardens .. Her passion for the desert was temporary.' 170

Chapter X August (in Villa having dinner, Hana sings Marseillaise, Hana & Kip in tent and he tells of his country, narrator tells of Naples in 1943 and city mined, then tells of Kip in Naples and sleeps beneath statue of angel; back in villa Kip hears of bomb dropped on Japan and goes with gun to EP, tells of the destructive nature of colonialism and imperialism, leaves and falls in river. Coda - years later he is in India as Kirpal Singh)

Hana sings the Marseillaise but not with the joy she sang it as a sixteen year old - 'She was singing it as ifit was something scarred, as if one couldn't ever again bring all hope of the song together. It had been altered by the five years leading to this night of her twenty-first birthday ... There was no certainty to the song anymore ... echoing the heart of the sapper.' 269

'He has mapped her sadness more than any other' 270

Kip tells her of the saints, temples, rituals 271

'Hana is quiet. He knows the depth of darkness in her, her lack of a child and of faith. He is always coaxing her from the edge of her fields of sadness. A child lost. A father lost.' 271

'He moved at a speed that allowed him to replace loss.' 272

Kip seen as 'The knight. The warrior saint.'273

Kip sleeps in church waiting to see if city will go up in fire ' Above his head the tentative right arm of the woman. Beyond his feet the angel .. They will die or be secure.' 280

When Kip hears of the bombing he goes to the EP, at last conscious of his betrayal and the knowledge of the great destruction that the British had done to his country and people.

'I grew up with traditions from my country, but later, more often, from your country. Your fragile white island that wih customs and manners and books and fprefeecs and reason somehow converted the rest of the world ..' 283

'If he closes his eyes he sees the streets of Asia full of fire .. this tremor of Western wisdom.' 284

'My brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe. The deal makers. The contract makers. The map drawers. Never trust Europeans.. 284

'American, French, I don't care. When you start bombing the brown races of the world, you're an Englishman.' 286

Kip leaves retracing his route away from Western culture. 'He was travelling against the direction of the invasion... 290 Falls into river.

Coda (last chapter) years later and Kip is now Kirpal Singh and Hana has not found peace yet.

After Kip hears of the atomic bombs on Japan he confronts the EP, rejecting the cultural discourses he represents and the ones Kip had internalised. He recognises his own colonisation by an essentially destructive and self-destructive force when he tells the EP that the West would never have used such a weapon against a white race: 'My brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe ... For this to happen.' 284-5

After Kip hears of the atomic bombs on Japan he confronts the EP, rejecting the cultural discourses he represents and the ones Kip had internalised. He recogbnises his own colonisation by an essentially destructive and self-destructive force when he tells the EP that the West would never have used such a weapon against a white race: 'My brother told me. Never turn your back on Europe ... For this to happen.' 284-5

Statues 104, 280

These are another religious relic, like the many references to saints, god, and churches, and represents peace of mind to Kip. While in war he seeks out religious statues to sleep beneath as he has trouble sleeping. The motif of sleeping recurs throughout the novel with characters unable to sleep because of their experiences in war. In this way the statues bring some stability, an escape from the brutality of the world outside, and enable a person to rest so that they can continue life. Throughout the novel 'holy places' and their importance are mentioned and the sattues are a holy place. The EP says that you die in a holy place ('It is important to die in holy places' 260) and Kip had sought solace within the shadows of statues usually when life was threatened all around him.

"he had relied on statues during those months ... Every night he had walked into the coldness of a captured church and found a statue for the night to be his sentinel. He had given his trust only to this race of stones .. He would place his head on the lap of such creatures and release himself into sleep.' (104)

Charterhouse of Parma 93, 222

The main character, Fabrizio, is initially thrown in prison as a spy for Napoleon, but is helped to escape. He sees a beautiful young girl, Clelia, and is attracted by her great beauty. After many escapades and quick loves he kills one of the women's lovers and is imprisoned again. He meets Clelia many years later (she had become friends with Fabrizio's influential aunt and they plan to help his esape) and they fall in love. She carries the rope ladder so he makes his escape. Fabrizio flees and finally is granted a pardon but when he returns Clelia is married. He is obsessed and wishes nothing but the sight of her. They meet again and know their love is forever. Clelia tries to remain rue to her marriage vows but is unable resist the urgency of her love and they become lovers. Clelia's bears Fabrizio's child; then, being involved in controversy with her husband, she entrusts the child to the care of Fabrizio, visiting them frequently. The baby dies. Clelia feels it is penance for her sin and grieves and soon dies. When he loses her, Fab no longer wishes to remain at court and retreats to the Charterhouse of Parma, a monastery, where he plans to spend his remaining days thinking of his lost love.

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