Denouement of the Reflections on THE ENGLISH PATIENT

After all, I must say that Michael Ondaatje delivers too many crucial and valuable underlying messages through The English Patient. It is my misfortune that I fail to grasp every single one of them.

            “A novel is a mirror walking down a road”. Just like other successful novels, this novel reflects different paths taken by different individuals, and hence teaches as much as one needs to learn for an entire life. 

Ninth Reflection on THE ENGLISH PATIENT

My last inquiry of my last reflection on The English Patient is purely for myself: if I were Almasy, would I have the courage to live on?

I struggled to persuade myself into believing that I can be as tough as the English patient, accepting and coping with reality. Yet, to be honest, my final answer is a definite no.

Although severely disfigured and disabled, Almasy still does not give up on his life. Overwhelmed by Hana’s care and love, his broken heart gradually begins to seam piece by piece. Hana once again gives him the confident to believe in the existence of good force in the middle of a brutal war. However, there is still nothing he can look forward to; even the end of the war does not mean anything to his distorted soul and damaged body. He has no dream, no hope, and no future…

            If I were Almasy, I would have killed myself after the plane accident. Why would I live with a disfigured face, which myself cannot even recognize? I cannot think of any rationale behind keeping myself alive when everything good about life is gone forever. What is the point of living when one’s memories are torn into pieces, body is destroyed by a plane crash, and soul is abused by the war—what is the point of living? I cannot live a day without hope and dream, which keep me moving forward even when I am exhausted.

            From reading the life of Almasy from multi-perspectives, I finally realized that the only real challenge of life is to learn to be strong and stay strong. The world never ends as long as the sun still rises in the next morning.  

Eighth Reflection on THE ENGLISH PATIENT

“No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

-       George S. Patton (US General during WWII)

The dictionary says that a war is a state of armed conflict between different nation, states, or groups. Yet, The English Patient elaborates the definition of war by depicting it as a battle due to greed and the hunger for power and domination with the sacrifice of not only countless lives, but also humanity.

War alters people…

From the very beginning of the novel, each character arrives at the Italian villa is either physically or emotionally wounded, or even both. The young nurse Hana is suffering from the sudden death of his father; Caravaggio’s thumbs are chopped off by the German army; Kip is undergoing the pain of losing both of his parents; most severely, the English patient loses his love, faith, hope…almost everything, except a merely pumping heart. Also, It is rather too difficult to not lose humanity as all the characters find it necessary to protect themselves not physically, but emotionally.

 Why should they bear all those pain and sacrifice their future?

…Because they are in the middle of a war, which severely, inevitably, and negatively affects everyone in any corner of the world, even if they are not fighting on the frontline. 

Seventh Reflection on THE ENGLISH PATIENT

"[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."

         The desert itself is presented as an integral element of the novel. Almasy, the English patient, is obsessed with the desert, where he can completely lose himself, and does not belong to any person or any nation. In his past, he is constantly seeking to immerse himself in something greater, something that is immortal, and he finally finds that in desert. It is also the only place where no one cares about the superficial concepts of nationality and identity, which he hates the most. Nevertheless, the desert is also where the plane crushes, where his lover, Katherine, dies, and where he is disfigure and disabled forever. It is a living entity that has the power to kill, to bury, and to alter lives.

I have never been to a desert and I would never want to go there. Merging all the information I have obtained from books, movies, and other people’s descriptions, I depict desert as a horrible place filled with nothing but sand. From my imagination, it is a place where no life would survive, except cactuses, due to the torrid heat and the dryness, which sucks away all the liquid in any living creatures. I thought that deserts must be drab as it is a lifeless land without any dialogues, laughter, or passions. To be more concise, I am afraid of deserts. To me, they are harsh, ruthless, and soulless.