Michael Ondaatje - The English Patient

12. I think when I see him at the foot of my bed that Kip is my David” [this page], says the English patient. How can you describe the connection the patient feels between himself and Kip? Is it emotional, political, or dependent upon some other tie? In what way do the two men reflect one another?

13. “Madox was a man who died because of nations” [this page], says the English patient. What is it about Madox that makes him experience disillusionment as hopelessness, and commit suicide, while Kip is able to create new life out of similar disillusionment?

14. Why does Katherine treat her lover with physical violence? What does it say about the relationship between the two, and about Almasy’s own character? What does the manner of Katherine’s death tell us? Does it seem to you that Almasy links sex with death and pain? Can you find other places in the novel where sex and death are explicitly connected?

15. What needs and motivations originally drew Hana and Kip together? Might their relationship have been a lasting one, had it not been for the Hiroshima bombing? Why do they not keep in touch in later life, though they continue to think so often of one another?

16. Why do you think that Hana, unlike Kip, has finally “not found her own company, the ones she wanted” [this page]? Can Hana be seen as a “victim” of the war, or have her experiences in Italy simply made her more clearsighted and realistic? How do her two renditions of “La Marseillaise” indicate the change that the war has wrought in her?

17. Can the novel can be seen as a mystery, with the identity of the English patient at its heart? Does Caravaggio’s identification of the patient solve the mystery, or does there remain a question at the end? How do other characters in The English Patient , such as Hana, Kip, and Katherine, discover or come to terms with their own identities?

18. How would you describe Ondaatje’s style: does the story resemble a film perhaps, or a dream? Why has he chosen this mode in which to write this particular tale? What is his purpose in making the action move backward and forward in time?

19. The English Patient refers explicitly to Rudyard Kipling’s Kim . If you know this novel, how does its presence within the text contribute to Ondaatje’s theme? In what way, if any, do the characters in The English Patient correspond to those in Kim? Is it significant that Kip was born in Lahore?

BOOKS BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE

COMING THROUGH SLAUGHTER

This novel brings to life the fabulous, colorful panorama of New Orleans in the first flush of the jazz era; it is the story of Buddy Bolden, the first of the great trumpet players, some say the originator of jazz, who was a genius, a guiding spirit, and the king of that time and place.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-76785-5

THE ENGLISH PATIENT

Winner of the Booker Prize

During the final moments of World War II, four damaged people come together in a deserted Italian villa. As their stories unfold, a complex tapestry of image and emotion is woven, leaving them inextricably connected by the brutal circumstances of the war.

Fiction/Literature/978-0-679-74520-4

RUNNING IN THE FAMILY

In the late 1970s, Michael Ondaatje returned to his native country of Sri Lanka. Recording his journey through the druglike heat and intoxicating fragrances of the island, Ondaatje simultaneously retraces the baroque mythology of his Dutch-Ceylonese family.

Memoir/Literature/978-0-679-74669-0

ALSO AVAILABLE:

Anil’s Ghost , 978-0-375-72437-4

The Cinnamon Peeler , 978-0-679-77913-1

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid , 978-0-679-76786-2

Divisadero , 978-0-307-27932-3

Handwriting , 978-0-375-70541-0

In the Skin of a Lion , 978-0-679-77266-8

Lost Classics , 978-0-385-72086-1

Vintage Ondaatje , 978-1-4000-7744-1

VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL

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