The old classic, The English Patient, consists of two different stories clashing and entwining into one throughout the novel. There are many different aspects of each character and they are created to be complex people. The most fascinating thing is that although each characters story clashes with the other, neither story would be interesting separate. The four characters and their conflicting relationships give The English Patient a complicated and fascinating story.
Ondaatje uses an extremely complex structure and poetic language to further the interweaving of the characters' lives. According to one critic, The author's four stories are not a story that gathers momentum from start to finish. They are the widening and fading circles on a pond into which history has plunged like a cast stone.
The overall structure of the book is circular and allusive, advancing, rounding back on itself, coming to endings that are not necessarily resolutions, and which may be co nnected to other starting points. The novel begins en medias reis with the burned English patient already installed in an upper room of the villa. It is near the end of the war. The other doctors and nurses have left leaving only the patient and his nurse. He can only give short, vague descriptions of exploring the Liberian desert. When Kip and Caravaggio enter Ondaatje interlaces flashbacks to give the reader glimpses of their pasts. The novel has third person, but often characters revert to the first person to tell their own story.
The least is learned about Hana's past. Most of what is known about her childhood in Toronto is given by Caravaggio. As the novel progresses the English patient's flashbacks become longer, more detailed and coherent. The farther into the novel the farther into the past he recalls. Ondaatje moves toward the denouement obliquely, avoiding standard conventions of plot and narrative voice.
The English patient's story is the oldest narrat ive material, the center around which the rest of the book builds. His story lies at the center of the book, just as the patient himself lies at the center of the villa. The dialog is often not substantial enough to carry the deep emotions of the characters, so Ondaatje often relies on interior monologue. I'm drawn to the kind of people who behave as though there were a finite number of words.
In addition to his skill with prose, Michael Ondaatje is a poet as well as a novelist, and the discipline and cadence of poetry informs all of his Writing, as one critic says. His prose is inventively figurative. There is figurative thinking at every level of this novel. His characters, stories, and settings make literal as well as figurative sense. He creates images and scenes that are unlikely but still intensely vivid. Through the intimacy and richness of his language Ondaatje draws the reader into the world of the characters. He is interested in mood and feeling.
I don 't like to throw characters into a plot as though it were a raging torrent where they are swept along, What interests me are the complications and nuances of character. Few of my characters are described externally; we see them from the inside out. Ondaatje also creates powerful narrative images that stick with the reader - a boy in a ditch with a bomb, a woman dying in a cave, a small Indian girl tied to a man's bed.
The article was produced by the writer of masterpapers.com. Sharon White is a senior writer and Writers consultant at term papers. Get some useful tips for thesis Writing and term paper Writing .
Author:: Sharon White
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