The English Patient Summary

The English Patient tracks the convocation of four people at an Italian villa - a
nurse, a Sikh sapper, a thief, and a badly burned Englishman - who come to forge
an unlikely family, and together discover the secrets of their respective pasts, and
the emotional wounds they share.

Hana tends to the burned English patient in a room of their Italian villa. The nurse
asks him how he was wounded, and he replies that he "fell burning into the desert"
from a plane. His plane crashed in the Sand Sea, and nomadic Bedouins saw him
stand up naked from the burning plane, on fire. They saved him, but he had no
memory of who he is: after the accident, he knew only that he was English. At
night the patient rarely sleeps, so the nurse reads to him from whatever book she
finds in the library. Books are Hana's only refuge in the Villa San Girolamo, which
used to be an army hospital. The villa was abandoned after the Allied victory, but
there are still buried mines all over the property.

Hana is only 20 years and won't leave the English patient even though he is
destined to die and the villa is unsafe. Soon, a new character emerges: a man with
bandaged hands named Caravaggio, who Hana used to know. He comes to the villa
and begs Hana to leave because she cannot stay with all the bombs still left
underground, undefused. Hana refuses to leave the English patient.

Caravaggio and Hana go for a walk in the garden. Caravaggio allows her to loosen
the bandages and change them, and Hana sees that someone removed both of his
thumbs. He tells her a German nurse was called in to do it and would have
removed his whole hands if the torturers hadn't suddenly heard the Allies coming.
Hana says they must have heard the bombing from outside signaling that the
Germans were fleeing the city.

Outside it is raining, and Hannah plays the piano in the library. She looks up, in a
flash of lightning, and sees that there are two men in the room. Two soldiers - a
Sikh and another man, both holding wet guns. She continues to play until she
stops, nods towards them. When Caravaggio returns, he finds Hannah and the two
soldiers in the kitchen making sandwiches. One of the soldiers, an Indian Sikh, sets
up a tent in the garden. This is Kip, who has come to the villa to demine the
property. Hana watches him bathe in the garden, and it's clear she's attracted to
him.

Kip finds a large mine in a field north of the villa, and defuses the bomb with
Hana's help. However, he is shaken by the experience and resents Hana because
now he feels like she feels that he owes her; that he is somehow responsible for
her. These feelings bring him closer to her, and soon they become lovers.

Hana sits by the English patient in his room, and he tells her that he was part of an
expedition in 1930 that went searching for the lost oasis of Zerzura. There he met
Katharine Clifton, wife of British aristocrat Geoffrey Clifton. Katharine was a
firebrand, full of passion and moxie, and the English patient, despite his resistance
to adultery, fell in love with her. Katharine somehow wanted Geoffrey to find out
about the affair, but couldn't bear to tell him. Torn, frustrated, Katharine began
physically assaulting her lover - leaving bruises on him from blows, cuts from
flung plates and forks. He made up excuses for his wounds, and yet continued the
affair, feeling disassembled by her.

Finally, Katharine told him they could never see each other again. She couldn't risk
her husband finding out about them. Eventually, however, he did - long after the
affair ended. When Geoffrey Clifton found out, he arranged a murder-suicide on a
plane trip and crashed the plane, killing himself, mortally wounding his wife, and
yet ironically leaving the English patient injury-free.

Hearing all this, Caravaggio tells Hana that he suspects that the English patient is
actually Almasy, a Hungarian spy. Hana says the war is over and says it doesn't
matter. Caravaggio injects the patient with more morphine and alcohol and begins
to ask him questions. The patient tells Caravaggio that after crashing in the desert,
he took Katharine's body to the Cave of Swimmers, where he made love to her
dead body, wrapped her in parachute material, and promised to return for her. But
he was arrested in El Taj by British Intelligence, and didn't return to the cave for
three years. He dug up the buried plane and put Katharine inside it. He put fuel into
the tank, and they began to fly in the rotted plane. Soon, however, the oil leaked
onto him, the plane began to schism, and it fell from the sky in flames.

Kip flashes back to his youth. He was supposed to be a doctor, but the arrival of
war meant he would join the army as an engineer - a bomb defuser. The life
expectancy in his unit was only ten weeks. Kip's leader was a man named Lord
Suffolk who Kip adored, but Lord Suffolk died while dismantling a large bomb.
Kip left the army when he found out that people expected him to replace Lord
Suffolk in position and in vision.

Hana and Kip's affair begins to cool - from lust it turns to celibacy, and soon Kip
begins to just hold Hana like his mother held him. She clearly is a surrogate for his
deceased mother. Caravaggio asks the English patient if he murdered Katharine
Clifton. He says Geoffrey Clifton was with British Intelligence - and Caravaggio
says British Intelligence knew about Almasy's affair with Katharine even when
Geoffrey didn't. When Geoffrey died, British Intelligence went to capture the
English patient and finally did at El Taj. Caravaggio tells Almasy that he worked
for the British as a thief and that Almasy was considered a dangerous spy - all of
British Intelligence had been looking for him. The English patient knows nothing
of all of this and can only attest to his love for Katharine.

One day, Hana sees Kip listening to the radio on his headphones in the garden. He
hears something awful, runs into the tent, grabs his rifle, and runs into the villa,
into the English patient's room. He tells Almasy that the Allies have dropped the
atomic bomb on Japan, and wants to kill Almasy for he is a representative of the
West - the West that would create such destruction. The English patient begs Kip
to kill him, but Kip doesn't. Kip leaves the villa.

At the end of the novel, Hana writes a letter to her stepmother and finally explains
how her father died. He was burned, and left deserted by his men. She could have
saved him, but she was too far away. The novel ends with Kip, who years later is a
doctor with a wife and two children. He thinks often of Hana, who used to send
him letters. Because he never replied, she finally stopped.

About The English Patient

The English Patient, published in 1992, is Ondaatje's most famous and critically
acclaimed work. The novel won Ondaatje the prestigious Booker McConnell Prize
in 1992, making him the only Sri Lankan writer ever to receive the honor. In 1996,
Saul Zaentz produced The English Patient as a film, adapted by Anthony
Minghella, starring Ralph Fiennes as Almasy and Kristen Scott-Thomas as
Katharine Clifton. The film went on to win a slew of Academy Awards, including
Best Picture.

The English Patient features elements that define much of Ondaatje's earlier work
-- his concern for historical accuracy, his experiments with fragmented
consciousness and fragmented grammar/sentence structure, and his poetic imagery.
Indeed, the opening of the novel is an epigraph from the real-life National
Geographic Society, reflecting Ondaatje's penchant for blending documentary with
fiction.
The English Patient also takes place during World War II, during which Ondaatje
himself was born. The story involves four people converging on a villa and
discovering the secrets of their past in an effort to move towards healing in the
future. The book, like many of Ondaatje's novels, isn't slavish to plot constructions.
Indeed, in several interviews Ondaatje has revealed that the plot didn't really exist
until he finished the first draft of the book. He frequently begins with only a
generative image. Ondaatje, in an interview to Salon Magazine, even noted,
"Almasy wasn't in the story in my head. Kip wasn't in the story. Caravaggio wasn't
in the story. It began with this plane crash and it went on from there."

Ondaatje has also noted that one of the more difficult passages of the book
involved Kip's departure from the villa, since it seemed slightly "deus ex machina,"
or willed through force of plot by an omniscient hand. Ondaatje says it is the one
part of the book he's often taken to task for, but he did the absolute best he could -
and he doesn't know "how to make it work better," since during the revision
process he developed Kip's character deeply enough to lay the groundwork for the
departure.

The theme of revision comes up again and again in Ondaatje's interviews about his
work, especially in regards to The English Patient. When talking to celebrated
editor Walter Murch, Ondaatje revealed that it is in revision that the true work is
done, sculpting the gems of inspiration that come from the initial generative
visions. He keeps working until he is finished, sometimes even taking up to 6 or 7
years to finish a book.

All in all, however, Ondaatje notes that he doesn't believe in closure to his novels.
At the end of The English Patient, after taking all his characters from their birth to
a given destination, he abandons them, and sees a "new life beginning for Hana
and Kip" off the page.

Character List

Almasy / The English Patient

Almasy is the burned English patient who stays at the village with Hana. He was
burned when his helicopter crashed - a crash engineered by the man with whose
wife he was having an affair. Almasy is a slippery, cryptic character, and is not
particularly adept at self-examination. The characters seem to live through him,
using him to heal their own wounds, as Hana does when she chains herself to him
to repair the emotional trauma at the hands of her father. Almasy seems at once
regretful of the circumstances that led to his lover's death and his own wounds and
mystified by the passion that engulfed him, quite literally, in flames. Having lived
a full life, he is still amazed by the consumptive power of love, and advises those
around him to seek it out, even though it can be as destructive as it is beautiful.

Hana / The Nurse

Hana is a twenty-year-old nurse for the Allies during World War II. She has spent
much of her life treating patients and watching them die, and she seems to have a
particular affinity for death. Initially we're not sure why Hana chains herself to the
English patient in this lonely villa - we sense that she is emotionally wounded, and
that she is withdrawing deeper inside herself. She is ultimately brought out by a
sequence of events - all of which bring people to the villa, including Kip and
Caravaggio, with whom she becomes involved in a love triangle. Hana falls in love
with Kip, but he seems emotionally distanced. Almasy urges her to find that fire
within and to kindle it. Ultimately it is revealed that Hana lost her father to an
accident where he was burned beyond recognition, but she was too far away to
save him. She never forgave herself, and chains herself to this English patient for
atonement.

Kip / Kirpal Singh

Kirpal Singh is a "sapper" (soldier) for the British, and works in demining and
bomb defusion. He found a mentor in Lord Suffolk, but when Lord Suffolk died in
a bomb explosion, he, like Hana, turned inwards. At the villa, Kip falls in love with
Hana, but we see that deep down he is uncomfortable with his own race, and has
never been comfortable being part of a culture that was subservient to the British.

Caravaggio

Caravaggio is a thief who had his hands amputated when he was caught during the
war. He comes to the villa to try to get Hana to leave, since the place is littered
with mines. Eventually, however, he falls in love with her (somewhat surprisingly,
since he's quite a bit older than her). Ultimately, Caravaggio is her practical guide,
where Almasy is her ethereal guide.

Katharine Clifton
Katharine Clifton was the wife of Geoffrey Clifton, and came on one of his
expeditions just after they were married. The English patient quickly fell in love
with this Oxford-educated firebrand and began an adulterous affair with her that
led to both of their demises, when Geoffrey tried to kill them both in a plane crash.
Katharine is stubborn and feisty, and is frustrated by Almasy's coldness. She leaves
him because he can't bear to be owned by her, but ultimately dies because of the
time they spent together. When she dies, Almasy leaves her in a cave, promising to
come back, but he is never able to.

Geoffrey Clifton

Geoffrey Clifton is Katharine's seemingly gregarious husband who is part of

Almasy's expedition to chart the Terzura Oasis. As a part of the aristocracy, he is
fiercely protective of his wife. When he finds out that she is having an affair with
Almasy, he initiates a murder-suicide plane crash that kills him and his wife and
burns Almasy beyond recognition. Later, Almasy learns that Geoffrey wasn't just
on the expedition for an adventure - he was part of British intelligence.

Lord Suffolk

Lord Suffolk is Kirpal Singh's mentor when he is a sapper in the bomb-defusing

unit of the British Army. Kip thinks of him as the best English gentleman he has
ever met - and one of the best people he has ever known, almost a surrogate father.
When Lord Suffolk is blown up by a 250-kg bomb, Kip is expected to take over for
him - to be the new leader of the troop - but Kip finds the shoes too big to fill and
escapes.

Madox

Madox is the English patient's best friend in the desert. He ultimately commits
suicide because he believes the Church is promoting war instead of withdrawing
from it. He seems constantly at odds with his practical and philosophical beliefs.

Major Themes

Healing vs. Denial

One of the more complex themes in The English Patient involves the extraordinary
emotional baggage that the main characters bring to the start of the novel. When
each character arrives at the Italian villa, it seems they are physically and/or
emotionally wounded: Hana lost her father in an accident, Caravaggio lost his
thumbs at the hands of the German army, Kip lost his mother and his surrogate
father, and the English patient lost both the love of his life and his own body. Each
character is given the chance to remember his or her story or speak it aloud, and it
is the process of shedding light on the dark corners of their respective souls that
seems to bring healing to each one of them. However, denial is a constantly
threatening force: Hana refuses to admit the villa is unsafe, Kip has yet to come to
terms with his race, and the English patient cannot even acknowledge his own
name, because of its entanglement with a separate, politicized identity. The
question of how much each character heals and how much each character denies is
central to the novel.

Passion vs. Frigidity

In this novel, the union and disunion of characters is often based in their ability to
communicate, and their inherent tendencies towards passion or frigidity. Almasy is
exceedingly rational and cerebral, and seems completely immune to matters of the
heart. Instead, he is concerned with knowledge, with learning in the textbook
sense. In Katharine, however, he encounters the opposite - a true firebrand who
lives moment to moment wrapped in the flames of passion. Indeed, the two learn
from each other: Almasy learns to love, and Katharine begins to become more
curious. Their differences, however, are what ultimately undo them: Katharine
cannot stand Almasy's coldness, his ability to so clinically separate himself from
her in public. The irony, of course, is that it is the passion - the raging furious
passion - of her husband Geoffrey that ultimately leads to her death, long after the
affair with Almasy has ended. As he recounts the story, Almasy is surprised at how
all-consuming passion can be - he can no longer remember all the details of his
own politicized role in the world, because all he cares to remember is Katharine
and the way she changed him. Hana and Kip struggle with similar issues, in that
both have built strong defenses against getting to know people, perhaps because of
the deaths of their respective parents. Hana reconnects with life by the end, but
we're not quite sure whether Kip does - we know only that he escapes and begins
anew.

Drive towards Life vs. Drive towards Death

One of the subtler aspects of The English Patient is revealed in the progression of
character arcs - in the ability of our protagonists to either reconnect to life and find
reasons to live or to embrace death. The English patient, for instance, hangs on to
life at the outset, the glimmers of his romance with Katharine so deep in his
memory, so fresh on his lips - but by the end of the novel, after recounting the
story, he seems ready to die. Indeed, when Kip confronts him with a gun, he asks
Kip to shoot him. Hana, meanwhile, begins the novel moving firmly towards death
- she is obsessed with it, even, to the point of wanting to stay in the unsafe villa
simply to be with her patient. But as she begins to see what waits for her once she
gives up her guilt and leaves him, Hana begins to drift back into the world. The
patient, after all, is a substitute for her father - a man who died after being burned.
Hana cannot forgive herself for having been so far away when her father died, and
thus clings to the patient who represents him. As she learns to forgive herself, she
loses her attachment to death and renews her engagement in life.

The Desert

The desert is an inextricable aspect of Ondaatje's novel in that it provides so many

dualities for imagery, theme, metaphor - the heat of the day, the cold of the night;
the seeming serenity and then the suddenness of storms; the quiet pierced by the
racket of war. Remembering his experiences in the desert, it seems like Almasy
cannot bring up his memories chronologically. Instead, the desert seems to refract
memory. And everywhere is the image of fire - the Bedouin boy dancing in the
moonlight, the plane falling out of the sky, the man on fire before he becomes the
English patient. It seems almost tamable, but his experiences there suggest the
reverse: the volatile desert, able to consume and ravage at will, is always in
control.

Loneliness vs. Connection

All of the characters come to the villa without attachment. Hana has nothing in the
world but her patient, Kip soon loses his sapper partner, Caravaggio is on the run,
Almasy has lost his love. It is crucial, then, to notice how alone these characters
are - how they could die in the villa without anyone noticing. Upon reaching the
villa, they seem happy in their isolation, but soon enough they begin to connect
and to see the threads that they have in common. By the end, even Hana has
stopped using the library as a refuge, and instead uses it as a place to playfully
prank Caravaggio and Kip.

Surrogate Parents
The characters in The English Patient cling to surrogate parents in order to relive
and heal from their childhood traumas. Hana lost her father in a terrible accident in
which he was burned to death. She was across the world from him and has never
forgiven herself for being so far away, and so she chains herself to the similarly
burned English patient to make sure that he is given the chance to end his life in
peace. The English patient is clearly a substitute for her father, and the desert a
symbol for the physical and emotional vastness between Hana and her dead parent.
Kip, meanwhile, has lost his mother, and we see that in Hana's arms, he finds the
comfort of a surrogate mother. There is love and lust at first with Hana, but soon it
becomes clear that all he needs is the embrace of a woman who he can project as
his mother. And just as Almasy made love to Katharine's dead body, now he has
Hana revering his dying body, allowing him to die having achieved peace.

Debt

Our protagonists repeatedly seem concerned with what they "owe" others. After
Hana stays to help Kip demine the bomb, Kip is resentful that Hana might now
expect something from him - that he owes her for her remaining with him under
such dangerous circumstances. On the other hand, Hana feels as if she owes
everything to the English patient, and cannot survive elsewhere because she is in
debt to him. Kip meanwhile believes Almasy owes him a debt for all the lives that
were ruined by Indian subservience to the British. Indeed, Kip believes that
Almasy, as a representative of the West, owes him something considerable, and
nearly takes his life over it.

Summary and Analysis of Chapter 1

Hana, a nurse, is working in the garden when she senses a shift in the weather. She
enters the house before it starts to pour and walks into a room where a burned man
lies on the bed. He turns towards her. Every four days, Hana washes his black,
burned body and pours calamine on his wounds. She tries to feed him a plum. The
nurse asks the man how he was burned, and he replies that he "fell burning into the
desert" from a plane. His plane crashed in the Sand Sea, and nomadic Bedouins
saw him stand up naked from the burning plane, on fire. They saved him, but he
has no memory of who he is. He knows only that he is English.

At night the man rarely sleeps, so the nurse reads to him from whatever book she
finds in the library. If it is cold, she moves into the bed beside him. He remembers
his rescue, the black and white silence in which he healed in the company of the
Bedouins. He just lay in a hammock, listening to the sounds of their feet,
occasionally letting his mouth open to receive whatever food they gave him.

The nurse has found that books are her only refuge in the Villa San Girolamo. The
villa was an army hospital at the end of WW II, housing all the wounded Allies
who took over this former bastion of the German Army. Now the nurse has enough
vegetables planted for them to survive, and a man comes from town occasionally
to give them beans and meat in exchange for whatever soap and sheets the nurse
can trade from the reserves left in the old hospital.

The villa was abandoned after the Allied victory, but the nurse and the English
patient insisted on remaining behind even when the other nurses and patients
moved to a safer location in the south. They are alone in this cold stone house
where many rooms are inaccessible because of all the fallen rubble. The nurse
sleeps in different rooms depending on the temperature or wind, and sometimes in
the English patient's room. She is only twenty years old, and seemingly
unconcerned with her own safety.

She picks up the notebook that lies next to the English patient's bed - a copy of The
Histories by Herodotus that he has annotated with pages from other books, or his
own observations. She begins to read his annotations of the classic text, of the
various omnipotent desert winds. She reads about winds that respect no man and
can wipe out any sign of humanity, depending on their disposition. She's distracted
from her reading by the English patient's eyes on her.

The patient tells her that the Bedouins were keeping him alive for some reason -
that he must have been useful to them somehow. He says they assumed he had a
skill because his plane had crashed in the desert. Ultimately he says he fulfilled this
expectation by accompanying them to a canyon, where the nomads unveiled a
stockpile of guns. He was able to tell them just by feeling the guns what their make
and gauge was, which helped them match the shells to the guns and reappropriate
the discarded weapons as their own.

The Bedouins kept the English Patient blinded most of the time, so that his senses
of touch, smell, and hearing became heightened. He traveled with them and was
only given sight after dusk where he could finally witness his "captors and
saviours." There were no women in the village, and he found desire only when
watching a thin Bedouin boy dance alone in the desert.

Analysis:
The English Patient is an impressionistic, almost surrealistic novel, requiring the
reader to piece together fragments of consciousness in order to truly discern a
narrative line. The first chapter begins and ends with Hana, who at 20 years old is a
rather mysterious protagonist. For one thing, we don't even learn her name in the
first chapter. She is prone to self-destructive behavior, spends her life taking care
of a burned man destined for death, and seems to have little will to live herself.
Indeed, her character might make far more sense as a wizened woman of 50 or 60,
but at 20 we're left with the prevailing sense that there is a darkness to her that we
don't yet know the extent of. As a result we cannot necessarily trust her intentions.
On the surface, she seems completely altruistic - an almost sexless creature of God,
dedicated to one man whose life is futile and whose memories will take us on our
narrative journey. But will she come into her own right as a character, and admit to
a past and a future?

The villa makes an appropriate setting for this patchwork of dreams - indeed, Hana
remarks that the abandoned house, now home only to her and the English patient,
is itself a dream, a puzzle of hallways and corridors leading to dead ends in some
directions and dizzying open spaces in others. It is this circuitousness of narrative
that becomes a thematic thread for every aspect of the novel - the idea of portals
that can open up into any character's consciousness, for us to imbibe memory,
feeling, and dreams of the past, present, and future of anyone at any time. The villa
itself has its own haunted history that we're reminded of constantly in future
chapters - once, it was owned by the German army and used as a stronghold for
their base of operations. Then it was taken over by the Allies and used as a war
hospital, where Hana worked. Now, it is a haven of neutrality, occupied only by
two.

Hana, as we'll see, is obsessed with the beginnings and endings of life, and it is no
surprise then that the novel begins simply with her asking the English patient how
he came to be burned. The beginning of his story is one of the most famous
passages in the novel, invoking the image of the man on fire falling out of the
crashing plane. Notice the sensuality of the imagery evoked by the English
patient's memory, even though it is steeped in the horrors of the accident. Is this a
product of character? Or of Ondaatje's imagistic language, which often seems too
poetic to truly capture the grittiness of suffering? As of now, nothing seems
particularly "dangerous" in this first chapter - indeed, there is a decided absence of
conflict. How long can the narrative sustain without such conflict?

Hana needs her books to survive, and the library becomes her hiding place. Like
the English patient retreats into memory, Hana retreats into fantasy. She has given
up on life: she has no interest in preserving her own, and ironically has chained
herself to preserving a man who seemingly has no reason to live. In a way,
perhaps, the two have a mutually projective relationship - Hana experiences death
through the patient, and the patient absorbs Hana's youth and life.

The nomadic Bedouins come across as almost ghostly, dreamy creatures. What is
repeatedly mentioned is their silence - and the absence of women, as if they were
direct descendants of divinity, without human legacy or tendencies. They take care
of him and transport him from place to place, and the patient cannot understand
why - until, that is, he realizes that it is for a most pragmatic concern. They want
him to teach them about guns. Suddenly the dream of the nomads - their
omnipotent mystery - crumbles in the way of pragmatism and war. The lack of
women becomes a liability, a symbol of the male penchant for belligerence. It is
only when the English patient sees a thin, androgynous boy dancing alone in the
moonlight that his sexual desire is reawakened - for in the boy he sees nascent
mystery once more, sensual pleasure that has yet to be corrupted.

Summary and Analysis of Chapter 2

A new character emerges - a man with bandaged hands who has been in a military
hospital in Rome for more than four months. While in this military hospital, he
tells the doctors and nurses nothing about himself, other than his serial number,
which confirms that he is part of the Allies and not a member of the German army.
Walking past a group of doctors, he hears Hana's name in their conversation and
asks them where he can find her. They tell him that she is with an English patient
in an old nunnery that was converted to a hospital after the Allies laid seige. The
nurse and the patient refused to leave. The man with the bandaged hands leaves to
find her.

The point of view switches back to Hana's - she is surprised, even shocked, by the
appearance of the man with bandaged hands, a man she once knew, who had come
all this way by train and walked four miles uphill in order to find her. He occupies
a bedroom and makes himself at home. Hana tells him that she hopes he didn't
come to persuade her to leave. She says that if he's going to stay they will need
more food - she has vegetables and beans, but she'll need chickens to feed three
people. Caravaggio - the man - responds that he's "lost his nerve," because killing
chickens reminds him of his recent misfortune. He was caught by the Germans and
they maimed his hands, nearly chopping them both off.
Caravaggio remembers his life as a spy for the Allies, and how they sent him to a
German function to steal documents from one of the house's rooms. During the
course of the party a woman took a photograph of him, and knowing it might lead
to him being found out, he stole into the woman's room at night, while she was
having sex, and managed to take back the camera. The woman saw him, but he
mimed cutting his throat to let her know that she could not tell on him unless she
was willing to risk her own life.

Caravaggio watches Hana eat, but does not eat in front of her as he is embarrassed
by the fact that he cannot use a fork or knife anymore. He is taken with Hana, but
he realizes she "has chained herself to the dying man upstairs." One day, he finds
her sobbing and tells her that she's chained herself to a corpse, despite her protests
of love for the burned man. Caravaggio tells her that she's ruining her young life,
caring for a ghost.

Hana remembers how she came to be a nurse. First she flashes back to the
Caravaggio who embraced her as a youth, the gregarious thief who was always
such a character. Back then she was warmer, but now Hana thinks of herself as
cold, hardened by her years treating dying patients. When she first saw the English
patient, she was taken with him - he had no face, just an ebony pool of charred skin
hardened into a protective shell. She remembers that there was nothing to
recognize about him. It is this lack of recognizing anything that she's attracted to.
When she first became a nurse, she cut off her hair so it wouldn't get in the way,
never looked herself in mirrors, and called everyone "Buddy" so that she wouldn't
have to use - and then stop using - any patient's name.

Caravaggio and Hana go for a walk in the garden. Caravaggio allows her to loosen
the bandages and change them, and Hana sees that they removed both of his
thumbs. He tells her a nurse had to do it - that they called in a woman to do it.
Hana tells them they stopped torturing him - thus saving his hands - because the
Allies were coming. They must have heard the bombing from outside that signaled
that the Germans were getting out of the city.

Outside it is raining, and Hana plays the piano in the library. She looks up in a
flash of lightning, and sees that there are two men in the room. Two soldiers - a
Sikh and another man, both holding wet guns. She continues to play until she is
finished, and then nods towards them. When Caravaggio returns, he finds Hana
and the two soldiers in the kitchen making sandwiches.

Analysis:
Hana isn't actually named until this chapter, through the eyes of Caravaggio. Recall
that in the villa, she is nameless - a woman shirking adulthood in order to avoid
living life, cowering inside her own body, attached to a man who is faceless,
nameless, without a future. As Caravaggio notes, she has chained herself to a dying
man in order to expedite her own spiritual death. She has lost interest in life. At
this point, we're not quite sure what prompted such a severe disillusionment, but
her history as a nurse certainly gives us some idea. Working in a war hospital, she
could never make deep connections - she learned not to use names, as soon enough
the patient would be dead. When her father died, suddenly it became clear that
death was the predominant theme of her life. And now she seems to be waiting for
it, even encouraging it's arrival.

Caravaggio is as slippery a character as Hana. On a simple narrative level, he is the

foil to the English patient - a living, breathing man in love with her. He realizes
that she is emotionally unavailable, but presses her to let go of the Englishman -
something that she is clearly not ready to do. When the soldiers show up at the end
of the chapter, we see that Hannah is starting to become surrounded by life - and
the question becomes whether she will blossom out of her cocoon of death or stay
sheltered.

Caravaggio's story reminds us of the terrors of war. In his harrowing story of being
caught by the Germans, the detail of the nurse who was brought out to cut off his
hands is perhaps the most chilling. There is a clinicalness to war - an antiseptic
feeling that permeates the entire book. Notice how much time Ondaatje spends
describing smells - the odors of war as a technique for making the imagery richer
and more effective. Clearly, Caravaggio still suffers from shock even though he's
somewhat physically recovered. He tries to understand how he escaped even more
torture, but Hana affirms the pragmatic reason for his survival: that the Germans
simply had to leave.

When Caravaggio finds Hana sobbing, she seems to imply that it is because she
loves a man who cannot love her back - the dying patient - but we get the sense
that she is in truth searching for the love of her father. Somehow, this charred
patient, unrecognizable, without a face, has become a surface upon which Hana
projects her father, praying for reciprocal love. Caravaggio insists she cannot love
him, but Hana responds, "Leave me alone," as if she wants nothing more than to be
in this house of dreams where she can fantasize about filling in incomplete parts of
herself.
The appearance of the soldiers is an interesting development, if only becomes it
happens in such a dreamlike manner. Hana is playing piano in the thunder and
lightning when suddenly these men appear carrying guns - even more reminders of
death and war in this relic of a house. For a moment, we think it is a fantasy, until
we see through Caravaggio that Hana has indeed welcomed these men and is
making food in the kitchen with them, as if accepting of the fact that she can no
longer be alone in the ruins. Perhaps now, after all this time, she must allow the
house, her life, and her soul to be rebuilt.

Summary and Analysis of Chapter 3

One of the soldiers, an Indian Sikh, sets up a tent in the garden. At first he will not
come into the house at all, occupied instead with dismantling the mines around the
villa, leftovers from the war. Hana watches him bathe in the garden, and it's clear
she's attracted to him. The other soldier, named Hardy, has left, but the Indian
sapper remains, to the chagrin of Caravaggio (who is irked by the Indian's habit of
humming contemporary Western songs). Caravaggio wanders at night and the
sapper follows him, but Caravaggio tells him never to follow him again.

The Indian sapper came to the villa because he heard the sound of Hana's piano-
playing. During the war, the retreating German army often left pencil mines within
musical instruments so that returning owners would be wounded. Hana loves the
physicality of the sapper's movements, his innate sensuality. Caravaggio, however,
thinks he is too fussy - that he washes his hands too much. The sapper counters this
by calling Caravaggio "Uncle," and responding that in India, you wash your hands
all the time, and before all meals.

Caravaggio creeps up on Hana, who is asleep in the library. Hana tells him that she
almost had a baby a year ago, but had an abortion because of the war and the death
of the father. She was in Italy at the time - and the combination of the war, her
work in the hospitals, the death of her father, and the abortion all have pushed her
to a place where she is more comfortable with death than with life. For a long time
she used to talk to the baby in her head, but then she stopped because there was so
much imminent danger during the war that she could no longer live in her head.
With all the death around her, Hana says, "I stepped so far back no one could get
near me. Not with talk of snobs, not with anyone's death."

Caravaggio and the Sikh take a trip to the valley together and talk about Hana. The
sapper says his nickname is Kip, because his first bomb disposal report in England
was covered with butter and the officer had jokingly said it was kipper grease. His
real name is Kirpal Singh. Kip also meets the English patient, who tells Hana that
they're getting along "famously." Hana simply notes to herself that there are too
many men in the house now.

Kip finds a large mine in a field north of the villa, and is surprised by its scale and
complexity. Hana insists on helping him dismantle it - she holds the wires while he
assesses the mine and cuts the right wire. He manages to defuse the mine, but it's a
sweaty, intense experience - and one that leaves him terrified and plagued by
nightmares. Hana holds him so that he feels safe, but Kip has lost his equilibrium.
He feels annoyed that Hana stayed with him while he defused the bomb - because
now he feels like he owes her; that he is somehow responsible for her.

Later that night, Caravaggio, Hana, Kip, and the English patient have a party in the
patient's room. Kip dances with them until they all hear a faint explosion in the
distance. Kip says it couldn't have been a mine, but then he smells the scent of
cordite and excuses himself without revealing his suspicions. Kip runs to where the
mine went off and finds Hardy, the other soldier, amongst the dead. He buries him
and returns to the party to find Caravaggio and the English patient asleep, but Hana
still awake. Kip is secretly resentful at Hana's casualness earlier the afternoon
while he dismantled the mine - for involving herself without a thought that her life
could have ended so easily. All he wants to do now is touch Hana, to feel her, but
he is plagued by fear and insecurity. Finally he makes his move: he dismantles the
patient's hearing aid and touches Hana's shoulder.

Caravaggio asks Kip whether he would be able to fall in love with Hana if she
were less intelligent than him - in other words, if he knew she was his intellectually
inferior. He says that Hana is in love with the English patient because he "knows"
things - because he's a talker who can seduce with words. Caravaggio says that
they should all leave - that they're risking their lives in the villa for no reason. Hana
responds that they can't leave the Englishman, and Caravaggio says she is stupid
for risking Kip's life for the sake of a man who is already dead. Hana through a
subtle physical movement shows that she's allied with Kip - and that Caravaggio's
words affect her little. One night, Hana sneaks into Kip's tent, and they become
lovers.

Analysis:

The love triangle between Caravaggio, Hana, and the English patient is
complicated by the arrival of the Indian sapper, Kip. In the last chapters, there was
no contest for Hana's affections - she was attracted only to the patient, for he
represented death and the spiral of darkness that Hana found so alluring.
Caravaggio, with his chastisements and philosophizing, offered little but the vague
abstractions that Hana always hated about life. Kip, however, is the antithesis of
the English patient - alive, taciturn, in the prime of his life. The title of this chapter,
"Sometimes a Fire," thus gives us a sense of Hana's imminent internal conflict and
impending journey. If she begins this chapter dead inside, with "no use for men,"
as she puts it, by the end, she will walk "without a false step" into Kip's tent so that
she can be his lover. She will leave the safety of the villa, if even only for a night.

The dismantling of the mine in the garden becomes a symbolic moment in the
main characters' journeys. Having fallen in love, Kip clearly wants to be as far
from the bomb as possible - and resents not only Hana's nonchalance towards it,
but also the fact that he's dismantling it in order to save her. After all, he comes to
the villa solely to warn Hana about the possibility of the mine in the piano. He
stays because he wants to ensure her safety and de-mine the area, which puts his
life at risk, since he would expect Hana to leave the condemned property at his
request. Why Hana doesn't leave, of course, is tied in to our analysis of her
character in the last chapter: she's afraid to leave the patient she's become so
dependent on for a fleeting sense of purpose. She's afraid to leave her refuge from
the world. She's afraid to reconnect.

Caravaggio, meanwhile, is obviously in love with Hana, and now with Kip
beginning to take over the role of the virile man, he can do little but chastise them
both for remaining at the villa, and attempt to mask his jealousy. At the same time,
however, he unwittingly drives them into each other's arms by daring Hana to
abandon her doomed love for the English patient - to rediscover life in some form.
Everyone, it seems, is learning from each other. In Caravaggio, Hana sees a man
who can sink into love, someone who can fill up with deep, passionate feelings. In
her own heart, she finds nothing but coldness. But around Kip, she begins to feel
the "fire" of the chapter title - that inkling that the embers of life might kindle. And
so she pursues it, telling Kip that she actually feels happy with him. She's surprised
by such happiness.

Of course, there is still an absence of conflict in the novel. At this point, Hardy has
died - but certainly not as a direct consequence of anyone's actions, meaning that
there is no guilt on any of our protagonist's shoulders. Caravaggio is not jealous
enough to be motivated to sabotage a relationship between Kip and Hana, and the
English patient is curiously absent through much of the chapter - merely a
projective surface for Hana's feelings. So where is all of this leading? Indeed, one
of the more subtle aspects of The English Patient is its willingness to challenge
traditional narrative structure, which often relies on planting incidents and paying
them off later, all in the effort of heightening a central conflict. There is no central
conflict here as of yet, because no one is in danger.

At the same time, we do sense the beginnings of "plants" that might pay off later.
We realize that there are active mines around the property that can kill any of the
characters at any given time. We see that Hana is starting to open her heart to Kip
and make him vulnerable - should he die, it would likely send her into a spiral from
which she would never recover, as she has just spent most of her adult life
obsessing about death. And what of Caravaggio or the English patient? Surely they
must serve some larger purpose than as mere foils to the Hana/Kip story? As we
continue, let us see not only how each character serves Hana's arc, but also how
Hana serves their individual journeys. For Ondaatje's novel is less about a central
character's journey and much more a dream novel where characters can take us on
tangents for the purposes of achieving a greater impressionistic effect - one that
suggests how a dying, burned man manages to bring all these characters together
and change the course of all their lives.

Summary and Analysis of Chapters 4-5

After the writings of Herodotus, the Western world expressed little interest in the
desert for hundreds of years. In the 1920s, the National Geographical Society held
a few lectures on the subject of the desert, and in the 1930s, these modest lectures
continued. By the end of the 1930s, however, the expeditions had begun again, and
the Libyan desert had become one of the theaters of war.

Hana sits by the patient in his room, and he tells her that he was part of an
expedition in 1930 that went searching for the lost oasis of Zerzura. The Desert
Europeans all knew each other, says the patient - like a small "clutch of a nation"
mapping and re-exploring. But on their first journey in 1930, they were hit by a
terrible sandstorm that destroyed all their food and most of their animals. He found
a desert town called El Taj, where he was saved. His journeys continued until
1936, when he met Geoffrey Clifton, who introduced him to his new wife,
Katharine Clifton. Clifton, wealthy, with his own plane, became part of the
expedition in search of Zerzura.

The patient says that the expedition party was surprised that Clifton brought his
wife, creating a bit of tension between the party members. But one night, Katharine
recited poetry and the patient fell in love with her voice. Soon enough he fell in
love with her body, her awkward willowness, and they became lovers.
Katharine Clifton dreamt of the English patient one night, and woke up screaming
next to her husband. In the dream, she sensed that the patient was angry, hostile
that a married woman was close to him. She dreamt she was bent over like an
animal, yoked back, unable to breathe. When she met him later, she watched him,
talking bombastically, with lofty intellectualism, and thought of slapping him - a
desire in equal parts sexual and furious.

Katharine was a firebrand, unable to handle the Englishman's politeness and formal
decorum. Though they could not be apart for long, and snuck around for erotic
rendezvous, Katharine wanted more. She somehow wanted Geoffrey to find out
about the affair, but couldn't bear to tell him. Torn, frustrated, Katharine began
physically assaulting the patient - leaving bruises on him from blows, cuts from
flung plates and forks. He made up excuses for his wounds, and yet continued the
affair, feeling disassembled by her.

Indeed, the English patient, normally frigid, independent, a loner, suddenly found
himself unable to be without Katharine. Though he was not comfortable with
adultery, he believed that they were an almost cosmic force together. Still, she
remained frustrated with their inability to truly be together, and treated him frostily
in public.

Finally, Katharine cut him off, saying that they could never see each other again.
She couldn't risk her husband finding out about them. He walked her home and
told her coldly that he did not miss her yet. "You will," she says. The Englishman
admitted he had been truly disassembled: he could not live without her.

Analysis:

The novel takes a surprising turn out of Hana's story, into the English patient's
memories. Remember at the end of the last chapter, we weren't sure where the
story was heading - because suddenly we had a proliferation of characters who had
reign over the narrative, able to control it's direction, and we couldn't be sure
whether it was a Kip-Hana relationship we were beginning to chart, a Kip-
Caravaggio rivalry, or a Hana-English Patient symbolic love affair. Ondaatje
surprises us then by following none of these lines, and instead returning to a
character we seemingly abandoned - the English patient.

The English patient himself reveals his own torturous love affair with perhaps the
most compelling character in the novel, Katharine Clifton. Katharine is very much
an untamed stallion. Though she is married to a bit of a wet blanket, she is nothing
but raw emotion and fury and passion - something that she manages to disguise in
public. The Englishman, meanwhile, is of a loftier nature - more frigid, more
intellectual, and in Katharine, he finds a soulmate who brings him down to earth.
The problem, of course, is the definition of the relationship.

The Englishman keeps denying to himself that he needs her, then realizes more and
more he can't bear to be without her for even a moment. Katharine, meanwhile,
can't bear not to have her love be public. She deliberately causes wounds and
marks on the Englishman's body so that somehow they might be discovered. But
they are not - for the Englishman does not want to be owned, and Katharine does
not want to tell her new husband. Finally, their romance is buried.

These are short chapters, but the feelings and imagery conjured in both are intense.
Notice how the Englishman first falls in love with Katharine - through the sound of
her voice reciting poetry. This harkens back to his falling into the desert from the
burning the plane - the raw sounds of the Bedouin voices, the lonely boy dancing
and ejaculating in the desert. There is a silence, a loneliness that is intrinsic to the
Englishman's soul - and it is appropriate, then, that he begins these chapters with a
review of the West's involvement in the desert, which has been intermittent,
noncommittal, until the arrival of war. The desert, he seems to imply, has always
been too much for the West to understand.

The novel, then, reflects the desert in some way - it is a place of silence where
there is a sheer absence of stimulation. The desert is defined more by absence than
presence. But then, in a torrent, a sandstorm can arrive to destroy everything. It is
the perfect mirror for life - for these characters' lives, who are defined by
nothingness, sacrifice, absence, until a torrent of passion consumes them, swallows
them up, and leaves them raw, naked, wounded, changed. If we follow the imagery
of the desert - the history of the desert, as narrated by the English patient - we
clearly see the themes, symbols, and rhythms of Ondaatje's story.

Summary and Analysis of Chapter 6

Hana injects the patient with morphine, and we continue listening to his memories.
He returns to 1936, Cairo, when he still was subsumed with thoughts of Katharine.
On an expedition, he asked his friend Madox the name of the hollow at the base of
a woman's neck. Madox told him to pull himself together.

Caravaggio tells Hana that he doubts the English patient is actually English.
Instead, he believes the patient is a man named Almasy who worked for the
Germans during the war. In the 1930s, Almasy had been one of the great desert
explorers - a man who knew deserts and dialects, and went on a search for Zerzura,
the lost oasis. When the war broke out, he joined the Germans, became a guide for
the spies, and took them across Cairo. Hana brushes off this suggestion, still
believing that the English patient is definitely English, but Caravaggio points to an
incident a few nights ago when the patient offered a few interesting names while
they were trying to name the villa dog: Cicero, Zerzura, Delilah. "Cicero," says
Caravaggio, was a code name for a spy.

Caravaggio himself is a morphine addict, and thus knows that an excess of

morphine will allow him to create a Brompton cocktail, or a sort of truth serum, for
the English patient. He wants to find out once and for all whether the man is
Almasy, but Hana says that the war is over and that it doesn't matter. Caravaggio
persists, manages to inject the patient with more morphine and alcohol, and begins
to ask him questions.

Before he crashed in the desert, the English patient tells Caravaggio he was leaving
Gilf Kebir in 1943. His truck had exploded, likely sabotaged by Bedouin spies
from one of the armies, and he went in search of a plane that he knew was buried
in the desert. After four nights, he found the plane near a place called Ain Dua. He
went inside a cave called the Cave of Swimmers, where he had left Katharine's
body wrapped in parachute material. He had promised to return to her. He
approached her naked, and ultimately made love to her body. He dressed, carried
her into the sun, and put her into the plane.

Three years earlier, Geoffrey Clifton had planned a murder-suicide that would
involve crashing his plane to kill Katharine and the English patient. The patient
says that they he and Katharine were not even lovers at the time, but news of the
affair must have reached Geoffrey somehow. The Englishman wasn't hurt in the
crash - and Katharine wasn't killed either, just injured badly. She could not walk to
safety, so the English patient left her in the cave alone and went looking for help.

In the cave, the injured Katharine - shattered ribs, broken wrist - remembered what
happened once they stopped seeing each other. Her husband began suspecting the
English patient once they stopped seeing each other in private - for he was so cold
to her in public. She left him not just because she was worried about her husband
finding out, but also because she knew she could never change him - that he would
never ever reveal one more inch of himself to her.

When the English patient returned to the cave three years later, he dug up the
buried plane and put Katharine inside it. He put fuel into the tank and they begin to
fly in the rotted plane, but the oil leaked onto him, the plane began to schism, and
soon it was on fire, falling from the sky.

Hana comes in and finds Kip and the English patient passing a can of condensed
milk back and forth. The English patient tells Hana that they are both "international
bastards" - born in one place, and choosing to live elsewhere, "fighting to get back
to or get away from our homelands all our lives." Hana watches Kip and sees traits
in him that she has in herself - the emotionally disturbed handmaiden, changed
forever by war.

Analysis:

The English patient continues his story, albeit elliptically, and we see the tragic
conclusion of his love affair with Katharine. Ondaatje is less concerned with
creating a compelling "narrative" account of the affair - a chronological account -
and more with the vagaries of memory, and how one experiences memory and
feelings and buried experience. As a result of this, the English patient tells the
story backwards - first he goes in search of a plane, where he finds Katharine's
dead body. Then he tells the story of Katharine's death. And finally he returns to
where we ended the previous chapter - just after he and Katharine agreed to
separate.

Katharine reveals that she left the English patient not just to prevent her husband
from finding out about them, but more because she felt like she couldn't change
him or open him up any further. He was ice cold, closed up, and had no interest in
revealing his deeper character. What's ironic, of course, is that it is only once they
separate that Geoffrey Clifton finds out about the romance. As the patient treats
Katharine more cruelly in public, her husband begins to suspect their prior history
and then seeks to mete out punishment. What he does, of course is extinguish his
own life, and then renew the seeming purgatory of Katharine and the Englishman's
relationship. The English patient takes her to a cave, promising to return, but
doesn't come back for three years.

From a strictly narrative point of view, the English patient's story is seemingly
abusive of the reader - it skips in time, leaves out details, and is as fragmentary as
consciousness. But it is the point after all, of this novel, to bring together this house
of frigid, dead souls, and to let them clear out the cobwebs and rediscover light, to
rekindle their fires, if only for brief moments. Each of our characters gets his or her
turn to find hope for life once more by revisiting the past.
In this chapter, Hana becomes even more of a bystander, while the other characters
reveal their wounds. Caravaggio is a morphine addict, Kip a man who has lost his
connections to his emotions, the English patient just a trove of buried memories.
Everyone's identity is so tenuous - especially with the war over. Hana has given up
connection to the world, and no longer has allegiances. Caravaggio is a thief who
shows little loyalty. And no one can be sure who the English patient even is. It is
one of Caravaggio's fascinating character quirks that he's so obsessed with
discovering who people actually are - as if it will help give him meaning in this
villa where identity seems so prismatic.

How Ondaatje begins and ends chapter is of vital interest, for it gives us clues to
the next chain of the narrative. At the end of this chapter, Hana turns her attentions
to Kip. Previously they were on the English patient - as if her eyes seem to create a
narrative spotlight that allow for the expansion and transmission of consciousness.
But now she's looking at Kip, and recognizing in him what she sees in herself:
disconnection, withdrawal, loss. As the spotlight turns to Kip, we wait to see what
has happened in his past to make him seek out this purgatorial villa, where souls
that think themselves doomed find their last glimmers of life.

Summary and Analysis of Chapters 7-8

Kip flashes back to Westbury, England, in 1940. In his Sikh family, he was the
second son. The oldest was meant to go into the army, the next brother would be a
doctor, and the final brother would be a businessman. But with the outbreak of
war, Kip joined a Sikh regiment and became part of an engineer unit assigned to
defusing bombs. The life expectancy in his unit was only ten weeks.

Kip's leader was a man named Lord Suffolk, who took a liking to the young Sikh,
introducing him to the customs of England "as if it was a recently discovered
culture." Kip thought of Lord Suffolk as the best of the English, and truly adored
and trusted him. He arrived in England knowing no one, distanced from his family
in the Punjab, only 21 years old. One night, he found that Lord Suffolk had been
killed by a 250-kilogram bomb while he was attempting to dismantle it. Singh had
been with Suffolk for over a year. He buried his emotions, pretended his mentor
was still alive, and went to dismantle a second bomb that had fallen half a mile
away from the first. He took no one with him.

Kip arrived at the bomb site and managed to dismantle it, keeping the deaths of
Suffolk and the other soldiers out of his head. He wrote down his notes on how he
dismantled the bomb and handed them to the officers. Because of his nascent skill,
he was promoted, and was expected to become the new Lord Suffolk. Kip,
however, was used to being an anonymous member of another race, and didn't
enjoy the attention. He escaped to Italy where he could once again be invisible.

Kip tells Hana about his family - mostly about his older brother who refused to be
subservient to England and ultimately went to jail. He tells Hana that he is
different, more silent and serene than his firebrand brother. He thinks his father is
still alive, but hasn't had letters from him in awhile. He seems to remember Lord
Suffolk much more, as if he is his true father.

In the library, Caravaggio accidentally nudges the fusebox off the counter and Kip
catches it before it falls, preventing an explosion. Seeing Caravaggio's horrified
face - a face that reveals that he now thinks he owes Kip his life - Kip merely
laughs. Kip flashes back to a time when he was lowered into a pit in a harness to
dismantle an Esau bomb. He remembers the frigid pit, how calm he was despite the
leaking liquid oxygen, despite all the people watching from outside the pit that he
would have killed with a mistake. He remembers that the only person who kept
him human during this period was his partner, Hardy.

Hana sits with Kip as he washes his hair. They have a habit of rising at daybreak
and eating dinner with the last available light. One night, after blowing out the
candle in the Englishman's room, Hana goes to the library. Kip goes to the library
to wait for her, and watches her lying on the couch. Caravaggio, seemingly
sleeping in the library, is actually awake and knows Hana is there. Caravaggio gets
up, walks over to Hana, and extends his arm towards her, but is grabbed by Kip.
Caravaggio, steamed by their game, leaves the room. Kip and Hana make love.

At some point, Hana and Kip sleep for a month beside each other without having
sex - a formal celibacy. They are reminded of the delicacy of love - the simple
comforts of touching, scratching, mutual affection. Kip remembers when his
mother died - how he scratched through the sari, scratched the skin, just as he's
doing to Hana right now.

Analysis:

It's Kip's turn to confess, and it's a confession we eagerly welcome, as he is

perhaps the most mysterious character in the novel. Hana, after all, has a clear
throughline and clear "need" - namely to remain tied to her patient, to avoid
venturing out into the world. But why Kip is here at the villa, why he is so frigid,
and why he dismantles bombs still remains unexplained. Here, we begin to get
answers. Kip is the middle child of his family, and came to the field of bomb
dismantling more or less by accident. But he found joy in the work under the
tutelage of Lord Suffolk, who treated him like a son.

If Hana has issues with her father dying, then Kip has them with his mother dying.
He seems to have little interest in discussing his father; indeed, he seems to see
Lord Suffolk as his father. Much of this chapter, then, is about the coping
mechanisms Kip has developed to handle all the pain from his father's rejection,
Lord Suffolk's death, and his mother's death. Indeed, as Kip is merely 21, and Hana
20, we can even see The English Patient as a coming-of-age novel in its own right -
a story about two young people who aren't sure how to find peace, and who have
yet to come into their own. (This is a reason why watching the film of The English
Patient as a substitute for reading the novel is a terrible error. In the film,
Minghella recasts Hana and Kip as thirty-somethings, losing the idea that they are
simply young, lost, in purgatory.) At the end of the novel, Kip lies in Hana's
embrace, thinking not of sex, but of his mother, and of the comfort he tried to find
in her at her death.

Lord Suffolk's death seems to have a terrible impact on Kip as well. When Lord
Suffolk dies, Kip is treated as his replacement - a man of equal stature and vision.
It is, of course, quite similar to a son who has to take over his father's business
upon the elder's death. But Kip can't handle the attention, the pressure. He is a
quintessential middle child, and flees to Italy, hoping to rediscover anonymity. But
here in this villa, his problems, his memories, and his fears return - as if alive in
this house of spirits - and in Hana he can only find temporary mollification before
sex becomes a burden, and the arms of a woman become a place to face the pain of
the past and relive tragic memories.

The English patient vanishes here, and we sense that he is losing his relevance in
terms of Hana's arc. Instead, we look to him to guide us through the vagaries, the
lessons of love that will soon inform Hana and Kip's eventual maturity. We're not
sure if they'll end up together - after all, no love in this novel seems to go without
terrible tests - but we do know that they will learn from the English patient, and
find in his story a redemption that will guide their own. The real question,
however, is that Hana and Kip both seem plagued by the loss of everyone who is
dear to them. Hana lost all her patients and her father, while Kip lost his brother,
Lord Suffolk, and his mother. All things are in place for either Kip or Hana to die
and leave the other to suffer, but the question is who needs the redemption more.

There is also the repeated detail of the dead body that comes again and again in the
novel. The English patient makes love to Katharine's dead body in the cave. Kip
holds on to his mother's dead body and mimics this with Hana. Hana comes to feel
more comfortable around dead bodies than around live bodies. The idea of the soul
seems foreign to any of the characters - the body is an end in itself. As we reach
the climax of The English Patient, let us examine whether the characters change in
their attitudes towards the body.

Summary and Analysis of Chapters 9-10

The English patient tells Katharine about how he fell in love with her. He says he
first saw her emerge from a plane alongside her husband, Geoffrey Clifton. He saw
before him a married woman who had unexpectedly joined their expedition, and
was struck by her khaki shorts and bony knees. He says that she was too ardent,
too eager for the desert, but that she took it upon herself to learn all about it - she
read everything about the desert, even hunting down marginal articles. The English
patient says he was fifteen years older than her, but that she was hungrier for
knowledge than he had expected.

He loaned her his copy of Herodotus, and she read from it at a party that Geoffrey
threw for the expedition. The English patient says that this is a story of how he fell
in love with a woman who read him a specific story from Herodotus. He didn't
even have to look up as she read the words across the fire. It was the story of King
Candaules, who was married to a woman whose beauty he could not keep to
himself. The king told Gyges of his wife's exceptional beauty and arranged for him
to sneak into her room and see her undress. But the queen saw Gyges as he left and
realized what her husband had done. She told Gyges he had two choices: to slay
Candaules and take over the kingdom, or to be killed. Gyges chose the former.
Katharine finished the story, and then looked at the English patient. With the help
of this story, this anecdote, he fell in love.

The English patient became doubly formal in her company until one day she came
to him and said simply, "I want you to ravish me." The two became lovers. They
did everything they could to avoid being found out by Geoffrey Clifton, but the
English patient knew it would only be a matter of time. He was an aristocrat - he
had a large circle of friends and family, one of whom would eventually find out.
But Katharine couldn't handle the ambiguity of the affair, telling the Englishman
that he just slid past everything with the fear of being owned or named. Eventually,
she returned to her husband.

Back in the present day, Caravaggio injects the patient with more morphine. The
English patient continues his story, but no longer uses "I." Instead, he talks about
Katharine and Almasy. Caravaggio asks the patient who is "talking" in these
memories, for the English patient cannot admit he is Almasy. The patient responds
simply, "Death means you are in the third person." The English patient remembers
bringing Katharine to the Cave of Swimmers and using the sand on the walls to
make her body beautiful. He left, promising to return, but when he got to El Taj, he
was just rounded up like a second-rate spy, despite his fervent protests about his
dying wife. The patient, interestingly, refers to Katharine as his wife, even though
he realizes he should have used Clifton's name.

Caravaggio asks the English patient if he murdered Katharine Clifton. He says

Geoffrey Clifton was with British Intelligence - and Caravaggio responds by
saying that British Intelligence knew about Almasy's affair with Katharine even
before Geoffrey. When Geoffrey died, British Intelligence went to capture the
English patient, and finally succeeded at El Taj. Caravaggio tells Almasy that he
worked for the British as a thief and that Almasy was considered a dangerous spy -
all of British Intelligence had been looking for him. The English patient knows
nothing of all of this and can only attest to his love for Katharine.

Kip and Caravaggio celebrate Hana's 21st birthday. Kip remembers when he first
flew into Naples, Italy in October of 1943 as part of a sapper unit. The Germans
had brilliantly and viciously attacked the Italians, laying mines all over the city and
even sabotaging the electrical system so it would go up in flames once the
electricity came back on. The city was evacuated so Kip and his fellow sappers
could demine the city.

One day, Hana sees Kip in the garden, listening to the radio on his headphones. He
hears something awful, runs into the tent to grab his rifle, and then sprints up into
the English patient's room. He tells Almasy that the Allies have dropped the atomic
bomb on Japan, and that he wants to kill Almasy because he is a representative of
the West - the West that would create such destruction. The English patient begs
Kip to kill him, but Kip doesn't. Kip leaves the villa on his motorbike, promising
himself that he will not think of Hana. His dismay causes him to skid and fall into
the water.

Hana, meanwhile, writes a letter to her stepmother in which she finally explains
how her father died. He was burned, and deserted by his men. She could have
saved him, but she was too far away. The novel ends with Kip: it is years later, and
Kip is a doctor with a wife and two children. He thinks often of Hana, who used to
send him letters, but because he didn't reply, she finally stopped.
Analysis:

So much of the final chapters of The English Patient are about echoes - about the
transmission of knowledge and the passing down of wisdom and lessons. Indeed,
one only has to look at the final image to see this: in the last moment of the book,
Kip catches a fork that nearly hits the ground. This is a seemingly innocuous
gesture, but one that mirrors the moment when he caught the fuse box that almost
blew up the villa. He has lost his need for a life-and-death struggle, abandoned his
desire to cultivate the coping mechanisms that help him feel. He has healed
somehow, found maturity, and is now ready to have his own family.

Hana, meanwhile, undergoes her own transition at the end of the novel. She writes
to her stepmother, and finally we learn why she has trapped herself in the villa. Her
father, it seems, was burned beyond recognition, and she was too far away to save
him. Now, the English patient has become a proxy for her dead father. She traps
herself in the villa, a utopian compound where she can be with him all the time, in
an effort to atone for the "sin" she believes she has committed. She can't let her
patient go, for to do so would mean letting go of her guilt over her father. When he
finally dies, however, we know that Hana will finally be at peace: she has done her
duty.

The structure gets more complicated in these final chapters, as the English patient
revisits his earlier story while filling in many of the earlier gaps. We begin to see
just how much he was in love with Katharine - so much so that he was blind to
everything that was happening around him as the British closed in on him. Indeed,
it seems that he forgot his own identity. Even now, when he is close to death, he
remembers nothing of Almasy, recalling only his love for Katharine. Caravaggio
keeps pressing him to absorb the name of Almasy, to claim it as his own, but the
English patient cannot. In death, he only has the memory of love. Everything else
is just third-person, irrelevant.

Kip's threat to kill the English patient is ironic, for he was the one who disdained
his older brother's confrontational demeanor. Recall that his older brother was
thrown in jail because he could not be subservient to anything English, anything
Western. Now, the moment that Kip hears about the atomic bomb, he comes after
Almasy, believing that if he kills an Englishman he will somehow be able to atone
for all the sins of the West. Ultimately Kip doesn't kill the patient and flees, but
there is lingering doubt as to whether he's ever really healed. He thinks about Hana
even after he has married; even running away - from the villa, from the West, from
war, from everything - cannot erase his feelings for her.
In the end, we're left with the sensations associated with healing over the death of a
man who came to value love over all else. Almasy is, in fact, the truest symbol of
war: a man whose identity is valued by everyone else, but who is unaware of his
own political significance. All Almasy ever wanted was Katharine - so much so
that he lost touch with time, space, senses, his physical identity, and his political
identity. From the English patient's journey, Kip, Hana, and Caravaggio learn that
love transcends all. And even if they don't absorb this fully (for they are all young,
headstrong, and lost in the whirlwind of immaturity), they all have their individual
moments of realization, growth, and transformation.

Almasy and the Desert

Michael Ondaatje has a penchant for blending documentary and fiction, and for
maintaining historical accuracy in his representation of time and place. In The
English Patient, we see this attention to detail primarily in his discussion of the
history of the desert. Over the course of the novel, Almasy leads us through this
brief history of Western interest in the Libyan desert.

Herodotus was the first to study the desert in The Histories, which charted the
different types of wind. Herodotus' history of the winds is at once compelling and
humorous - he lists wind like the aajej, the winds in southern Morocco, which the
local dwellers defended themselves against with knives; the africo, which is so
strong, it blows into Rome on occasion; even a wind called the datoo out of
Gibraltar, which carries fragrance. The gusto with which Almasy documents each
of the winds in Herodotus' history bolsters our sense of his character as an
information-gatherer. He is obsessed with facts - knowing, learning, acquiring - not
so much out of curiosity, but more because he believes (at least initially) that it is
the purpose of life.

After Herodotus, says Almasy, the Western world demonstrated little interest in the
desert for hundreds of years. For over 2300 years, there was an "averting of eyes,"
a yawning chasm of silence. In the 1800s, the desert became popular amongst
"river seekers," before finally becoming a center of renewed fascination in the
1920s. This interest manifested largely through privately funded expeditions that
usually ended with prestigious lectures at the Geographical Society in London at
Kensington Gore. Indeed, Almasy expresses a desire to map the desert that recalls
how modern people wish to climb Everest - for the challenge, because of its
novelty, and because it is a grand way to show off. Still, these expeditions required
years of preparation, research, and fundraising, and the glamour of the expedition
fad didn't disguise the fact that many people died. Eventually the desert lost all
glamour when it became a theater of WWII in 1939.

Almasy calls himself a new breed in those WWII years - part of the Desert
Europeans, transplanted from Europe to the desert and forced by circumstances to
become more familiar with the desert than they even were with their homeland.
The desert becomes his new home, and he becomes a master of its elements, its
volatility, and its equanimity. After the war, the West again lost interest in the
desert. And thus Almasy thinks of himself as a man without a homeland: he
forsook his home for war, and war for the desert, and cannot even remember all the
political associations of "Almasy" - hence his willingness to disown the name
Caravaggio gave him. He thinks of himself only as a man of the desert.