The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje - Essay Example

Religious Imagery in The English Patient In his novel, The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje presents the haunting tale of four individuals groping their way toward a new existence in the final months of World War II Italy. Gathering together as if by accident in a war-torn villa in the Italian countryside, Hana, Kip, Caravaggio and The English Patient share their stories of grief and loss while they attempt to come to new understandings of themselves in the aftermath of their various experiences and the damage this has caused. Hana is the shell-shocked nurse who cannot bring herself to face the ravaged bodies and unending cycle of death she has encountered as a Canadian nurse following the news of her father’s death. She retreats from the war in her care of the English Patient, a man who has himself been so badly burned that he cannot be moved and claims to have lost all sense of his own identity. Caravaggio, a thief and a man Hana has known in her previous life as something akin to an uncle, arrives at the villa with both thumbs removed from his hands and his profession taken from him. Kip is the final character to arrive at the villa, an Indian working with European Allied forces to diffuse the various land mines and delayed action bombs left behind by the Germans as they retreated out of Italy. In his portrayal of each of these characters, especially those of the English patient, Hana and Kip, Ondaatje manages to infuse each with religious imagery that both highlights their unique qualities as well as underscores the destructive forces of war. The English Patient is the first and most obvious character to receive religious status. On the very first page of the book, the reader is treated to a scene in which Hana, much like Mary of Biblical days, can be seen gently washing the feet of the burned patient as he lies in his painted garden room. Although this is a ritual total body washing that occurs once every four days, the significance of the feet cannot be misinterpreted based upon subsequent sentences. As his burned body is described, the nurse focuses upon “the thin tight hips. Hipbones of Christ, she thinks. He is her despairing saint” (3). The imagery doesn’t stop with his physical description, however. As he tells her his story, the English Patient, who we later learn is truly named Almasy, reveals that he was born again out of the burning wreck of a plane that crashed into the desert floor and the ways in which the Bedouin natives had rescued him. “… the sand itself caught fire. They saw me stand up naked out of it … I was perhaps the first one to stand up alive out of a burning machine” (5). As part of the Bedouin legend, this burning pilot was one of the angels of God, fighting that mysterious war in heaven that they had been witness to occasionally as the planes crossed and crashed into their homeland. As he describes the ways in which the Bedouin treated him following his discovery, he describes to Hana the almost sacred hush that would fall upon these people whenever he was awake, the constant vigilance they kept besides his hammock and the way in which his naked body was suspended is if upon an altar (6). As the novel unfolds, however, it becomes more and more clear that the English patient may not even be English and may, in fact, have been working for the Germans during the war. Although it is finally proven that the English patient is the German spy known as Almasy, the telling of his story also allows this man to clear his name of the evil that has been attached to it to reveal the desperation of love that drove him. While he admits that he was the man who accompanied Eppler across the desert sands, he indicates this was done under pressure as the only means he could see of freeing himself of his captors and returning to Katherine, whom he had left dying in the Cave of Swimmers (254). Despite his enforced position in the war, the English patient has been destroyed by it regardless of his own impression of anonymity. However, his conversations with Caravaggio serve to reveal his true identity, including the higher nature that resides within him. For her part, Hana does not think of herself as anything heroic or angelic in the little things she does to try to make her English patient comfortable or in her insistence upon staying with him when the rest of the hospital moved to safer ground. Far from angelic, her job up until this point has been primarily to take life, slipping the saline needle into the right vein when the time comes (84) and taking the life of her own baby when it becomes obvious that she will be unable to care for it and the soldiers as well. Instead, in her decision to stay with the English patient, she is shown to be retreating from the war and from the world in general, too shell-shocked to do much else. Because of the nature of his injuries, which so closely mimic the injuries her father had suffered, Hana’s care of this patient can be seen to be a surrogate for the beloved father she was unable to help in his final days. The war has destroyed her spirit and rendered her incapable of fulfilling her envisioned destiny. Despite this, her willingness to stay reveals a deeper nature that is present throughout the book as well. Her role as a nurse immediately establishes the long-associated image of an angel in human form bringing relief and comfort to those destroyed by war. Although it is clear the patient will eventually die of his injuries, it is also clear that without her aid, his death would be infinitely more uncomfortable. In this hopeless battle against death, too, Hana’s efforts can be seen to be angelic in their nature, providing her patient with soft foods he can easily swallow, cooling comfort against the burn and itch of his destroyed skin and nearby warmth in the cold evenings when blankets would be too painful. In this self-enforced isolation, she is often seen in her own little circle of light, like a halo, as she reads to her patient or to herself. In her own cool, straightforward approach to the men of the household, she is able to bring healing to those others who join her at the villa. Although actions such as her stealing out at night to sleep with Kip in his garden tent do little to promote the concept of angel, it is precisely this action that enables Kip to return to the human world again from the numbing treatment he has received as a minority ethnicity in an army of English. Similarly, her use of the crucifix from the villa’s chapel to create a scarecrow to protect her garden conveys two wholly disparate images. On the one hand, it can be seen as a sacrilege to use the crucifix in such a manner and a profound statement regarding Hana’s loss of faith in anything. However, on the other hand, this gesture can be seen both as a call for protection over the small garden that provides the inhabitants of the villa with their only source of sustenance in their isolation as well as an act of faith that a higher power will watch over them and keep them safe in the wilderness. As in the case of the English patient, the war has both destroyed and created Hana in her finest image. Kip’s association with religious imagery throughout the book is at once revealing and disguising. He is affected by the religion of this land, but also becomes a part of it as an innocent saint of the land. This Indian native has been brought up with different gods and different traditions, yet is able to find a connection to the tall white religious statues he encounters as he traverses Europe in his duties as a sapper. One of the most profound associations he makes is with Isaiah the prophet, as he first looks upon an image of him in the Sistine Chapel and then, much later, remembers the words quoted to him by the English patient: “Behold, the Lord will carry thee away with a mighty captivity, and He will surely cover thee. He will surely violently turn and toss thee like a ball into a large country” (294). Although he eventually lands in his own country, with his own wife and children, living the life that had been ordained for him from the beginning, the sapper can relate to this treatment as he remembers Hana and his experiences in the war that have enabled him to find the life he lives now. This is evident in the way he has continued to seek guidance throughout the war from the other religious symbols he encounters. As he watches over the citizens of Gabbice, he witnesses the Marine Festival of the Virgin Mary one evening and recognizes that “whatever protection he was supposed to provide for this town was meaningless” (80) as the procession wound its way through the streets and up to the headland where he kept the all-night vigil over the statue. Later, as one of the sappers sent to diffuse the bombs reported to be strung all around Naples, Kip decides to rest in a chapel in which he has seen yet another scene. Raised within the Christian tradition, he might have recognized the tableau as that of the Virgin Mary supplicating the angel of God to give this burden of carrying the messiah to another girl, but instead recognizes them only as parental figures (280). Sleeping under the arm of the human, he unconsciously associates himself with the mother figure even as he recognizes a military sternness in the face of the angel. “The tableau now, with Kip at the feet of the two figures, suggests a debate over his fate. The raised terra-cotton arm a stay of execution, a promise of some great future for this sleeper, childlike, foreign-born” (281). If Kip has become an innocent saint, this tableau could be interpreted as a woman pleading to allow this innocence to last, to preserve this man from the devastation about to pass. While he is preserved for the bright future suggested, like Mary who is not saved from her allotted place in life, Kip is not spared the harsh reality of the nuclear bombs. Again, war has both revealed the higher nature of the man even as it destroyed him to the core. Throughout The English Patient, then, one can trace numerous such religious references and allusions associated with the various characters. To a lesser extent, even Caravaggio can be seen to have religious connections through his role as the Devil’s advocate, or perhaps the advocate of the Lord as he continuously drives the other characters to delve into the depths of their destructions to find the redeeming qualities that will save them. While the English patient is initially painted as a saint of the war, he is eventually revealed to be first an enemy of the state and then an unwilling participant who can do no more than love a woman. While Hana is initially depicted as a casualty of war, she is shown to be something much more powerful and redeeming than she gives herself credit for. Finally, Kip, who seems an almost accidental addition to the little villa family, enters the story as an innocent saint, unaware of his own role in the tableau and just as strongly affected by it. Works Cited Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. New York: Vantage Books, 1992. Read More