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The English Patient is an important piece of postcolonial literature, which means it examines the effect of Western power and colonization, particularly by the British, on the people of the East. One of the earliest and most significant postcolonial novels is Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart .
- Plot Summary Plot
In 1930, the English patient went into the desert in search...
- Summary & Analysis
The Bedouin taught the English patient how to raise his...
- Themes
Kip is the only character of color in The English Patient,...
- Characters
The English patient ’s friend and part of his desert...
- Chapter II
The English patient thinks that ground-up peacock bones are...
- Chapter III
The Sikh, an Indian sapper named Kip, sets up his tent near...
- Chapter IV
The English patient tells Hana that his first desert...
- Chapter V
The first time Katharine dreamed of the English patient, she...
- Plot Summary Plot
The English Patient is a 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje. The book follows four dissimilar people brought together at an Italian villa during the Italian Campaign of the Second World War.
- Michael Ondaatje
- 1992
- Style
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- Plot
In The English Patient, the past and the present are continually intertwined. The narrative structure intersperses descriptions of present action with thoughts and conversations that offer glimpses of past events and occurrences. Though there is no single narrator, the story is alternatively seen from the point of view of each of the main character...
The novel opens with Hana, a young nurse, gardening outside a villa in Italy in 1945. The European theater of the war has just ended with the Germans retreating up the Italian countryside. As the Germans retreated, they left hidden bombs and mines everywhere, so the landscape is particularly dangerous. Although the other nurses and patients have le...
One day, a man with bandaged hands named Caravaggio arrives at the villa. He is an old family friend of Hana's father, Patrick, and had heard about her location while he was recovering in a hospital a few miles away. In Canada, where Caravaggio knew Hana years ago, he was a thief. He tells her how his skills were legitimized in the war and how he p...
Little by little, the English patient tells this whole story. Caravaggio, who has suspected the English patient was not really English, has his suspicions confirmed. He fills in gaps for the Almasy, telling him that Geoffrey Clifton was really an agent of British Intelligence and that Intelligence had known about Almasy and Katharine's affair the w...
Kip has felt emotionally removed from everyone in his job as a sapper. When he meets Hana, he uses her to once again connect to humanity. All the residents of the villa celebrate Hana's twenty-first birthday, and Kip grows comfortable as her lover. When August comes, however, Kip hears on the radio of the atomic bomb that the United States has drop...
- Michael Ondaatje
- 1992
Hana, a French-Canadian WWII Royal Canadian Army Medical Corps combat nurse, discovers her boyfriend has been killed through a wounded soldier. In October 1944 Italy, she is caring for a dying, severely burned English-accented patient who says he cannot remember his name.
AwardCategoryNominee (s)ResultWonWonNominatedNominatedIn 1930, the English patient went into the desert in search of Zerzura, an ancient city in the Gilf Kebir. The European explorers, including the English patient and his friend, Madox, were “nationless” in the desert among the native tribes.
The English Patient, a 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje, is a work of historical fiction that explores themes of love, war, and identity. The novel is set in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II and tells the story of four individuals brought together by the war: Hana, a Canadian nurse; Caravaggio, a Canadian thief and spy; Kip ...
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The patient is Count László de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes), a Hungarian cartographer who in the late 1930s is leading a Royal Geographical Society mapping and surveying expedition in Libya and Egypt with his English partner Madox (Julian Wadham).
