“The English Patient” by Michael Ondaatje (post 4): Climactic event at end of novel reveals that author had racial, not psychological, agenda.

I had wondered why so many pages were being devoted to the bomb deactivation activities of one of the main characters, Kirpal (Kip) Singh, an Indian Sikh in the British army.

The reason is revealed by the climactic event at the end of the novel: news that atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan. A narrator says that whites had used such a horrendous weapon only because the victims were “brown.”

Thus, the main theme of this novel is that the brown character, Kip, who deactivates bombs, is a symbol of good, while the white characters (at least the white male characters) are crooks, spies, and nuclear bombers.

The narrator is not so negative about white women, not only because they don’t drop nuclear bombs on brown people, but because he does not know them well enough. As he says about Hana, the white nurse, in his end-of-novel reflections about what happens in the future to the main characters, “She is a woman I don’t know well enough to hold in my wing, if writers have wings, to harbour for the rest of my life” (1, p. 320).

In short, this novel is essentially a racial parable about the good browns and the bad whites, and it is only incidentally interested in the psychology of these particular characters. Which is why nothing further is said about the English patient’s multiple personality (see previous post), the ignoring of which for the rest of the novel is one reason that readers and reviewers, by the end of the novel, usually don’t remember that the issue ever came up.

How can a novel depict multiple personality if the author did not intend to do it or even recognize that he had done it? Authors hold the mirror up to their own psychology.

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