History, Words, and Storytelling Theme Analysis

Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is a fictional account of historic events, and several of his characters—such as the English patient, László Almásy, a Hungarian desert explorer who guided German spies across the North African desert during World War II—are based on actual historical figures. The novel unfolds in a series of stories told by the main characters, including Almásy, his Canadian nurse, Hana, an Italian-Canadian thief named Caravaggio, and Kip, an Indian sapper, after they all converge at an abandoned Italian villa near the end of World War II. Almásy has been badly burned in a plane crash and suffers from amnesia, and he is known by Hana and the others as simply the English patient. In the English patient’s possession is a copy of The Histories, a book by the ancient Greek writer Herodotus, which the English patient continually reads, rereads, and writes in. The relationship between books and stories is a repeated theme in the novel. Through the stories read and told in The English Patient, Ondaatje effectively argues that literature offers not just entertainment but a way to understand and shape the world, and that history is best kept and told through personal experiences and stories, not through official records and history books.

In addition to Almásy’s copy of The Histories, Ondaatje mentions several other literary works, which reflects the importance of storytelling in the characters’ lives. Further, the novel shows how characters uses these texts as a means of understanding the world, and of creating understanding between each other. Madox carries a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina across the North African desert, and tries to explain to Almásy the people they meet in terms of Tolstoy’s novel. Madox interprets his unfamiliar surroundings through Tolstoy, and he tries to share this with Almásy. As Hana watches Kip befriend the English patient, she understands their strange friendship through “a reversal” of Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, only “the young student is now Indian, [and] the wise old teacher is English.” Hana has been reading the novel to the English patient, and like Madox, she turns to the novel to better appreciate her surroundings. Hana also uses a blank page at the back of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans to keep a personal journal. Like Almásy’s annotated copy of The Histories, Hana’s life and experiences mix and mingle with book until they are one. It is not just the characters who use these texts as a way to relate to the world and each other, though. Ondaatje purposefully included each of the titles mentioned, and the novel of The English Patient also exists in relation to those titles. Anna Karenina, for instance, is perhaps the most famous novel about an affair ever written, referenced in this novel about a passionate affair. The English Patient doesn’t always use texts as mere reference points, but rather seems to be engaged in a kind of argument with those previous texts. For instance, Kipling’s Kim is a coming-of-age story about an Irish orphan in India who, through a series of adventures, grows up to become an important spy in service to the British Empire. It is a novel that portrays the Empire as great, and the British presence in India as welcome and mutually beneficial. The title of the novel and the author’s last name closely resemble Kip’s own name, which is purposeful. But Kip’s story is a kind of corrective to Kim, in which Kip, an Indian, has adventures not in India but in Europe, and comes to see the evil of the British Empire and its fundamentally racist and exploitative attitudes toward India. The English Patient treats books seriously, and sees itself as existing in conversation with those books, sometimes in agreement, sometimes not. “Words, Caravaggio,” Almásy says at one point. “They have a power.” Both The English Patient, and its characters, exist in a world in which words—in which stories—give the world meaning.

While storytelling and literature serves as a means for Ondaatje’s characters to enrich and interpret their lives and surroundings, there is a direct connection between stories and history. According to the English patient, whenever he is left alone in someone’s house, he always goes to the bookcase, “pulls down a volume and inhales it. So history enter us,” he says. Both Almásy and Ondaatje draw a parallel between stories and history, which is often relayed through the telling and reading of stories. When Almásy falls in love with Katharine Clifton, the love of his life, he does so as she read aloud from The Histories. She chooses a passage of the book that Almásy usually passes over, but by the time she has finished reading, he has completely fallen in love with her. Almásy’s connection to both history and literature is reflected in his love for Katharine. But Almásy’s copy of The Histories plays another role in the way that the novel engages with history. The Histories, as it turns out, is a rather odd book of history. In fact, it might be more accurate to call it a book of historical stories, rather than a book of straight history—it concerns itself with the stories of people, with personal histories, rather than the sweep of big historical events. While Almásy’s fate in the novel is never actually revealed, Hana and Caravaggio decide that if and when the English patient dies from his burns, they will bury everything except his copy of The Histories. In death, then, Almásy’s story will live on through Herodotus’s book, his own personal history and interpretations become tied up and preserved along with those in the book. Almásy tells Caravaggio at one point that all people are “communal histories, communal books,” who carry stories of the past into the future. The English Patient seems to suggest an even bolder idea: that such personal histories—which are often overlooked in the broad view of “history”—are vital to understanding both the past and the present.