“The English Patient” by Michael Ondaatje: In chapter one, Ondaatje is comfortable with having both characters nameless, at least temporarily

I have just started this novel, which I chose because it is so celebrated (2018 Golden Man Booker). The only thing I had read that might have made it relevant to multiple personality was that the title character is misidentified as English because he has amnesia (memory gaps are a cardinal symptom of multiple personality).

However, the 25-page first chapter would appear to show that if the so-called English patient has claimed amnesia, he has lied. Flashbacks to when he had been in a plane crash, was severely burned, and had been cared for by Bedouins, indicate that the Bedouins had valued him for his knowledge and memory about weapons (the story takes place toward the end of WWII) and that his autobiographical memory had been intact.

The nurse who is now caring for him does appear to be having a nervous breakdown of some sort, and it is certainly possible that it will turn out to be a dissociative disorder (the diagnostic category of multiple personality). But so far, all I can say is that she seems to have that nonspecific condition which I call “literary madness.”

The only other thing in this first chapter that might suggest multiple personality is that both patient and nurse are nameless. Namelessness is a recurring subject in this blog, because multiple personality often includes nameless alternate personalities. And even though, as I gather, these two characters will be getting names, the question arises as to why the author is comfortable with having them nameless even for a while. Is that the way the characters initially came to him? (I am not inclined to accept literary technique as a sufficient explanation.)

But if that turns out to be all there is to suggest multiple personality, I am grasping at straws.

1. Michael Ondaatje. The English Patient. London, Bloomsbury, 1992.