Chapters 8, 9 and 10

Hello readers! Welcome back. I have finally finished The English Patient and let me tell you, it was not an ending that I could have imagined.

This book has always felt extremely fragmented due to the many flashbacks and focus shifts. Similarly, the ending leaves each character where you might not have expected them to be both physically and mentally. It's an ambiguous ending because none of the characters have a plan. They are left at the Villa at different points in their development as people, leaving the reader to form their own opinions on what might happen next in these complicated lives.

"The Holy Forest"

This chapter doesn't focus on a certain flashback or character, but rather on how these people live in the villa together. We see a kinder side of Caravaggio as he learns to respect Kip after he saves him from a bomb:

"He could walk away, never see him again, and he would never forget him. Years from now on a Toronto street Caravaggio will get out of a taxi and hold the door open for an East Indian who is about to get into it, and he will think of Kip then (208)."

Caravaggio has always been a hard person to understand. At times he's a foil to the sympathetic, emotional and compassionate Hana, especially when trying to coax the patient into revealing his past. This little instance of mutual respect surprised me.

Hana also grows through her experiences in the villa. As Caravaggio continued to watch her grow up and mature, "he loved her more than he loved her when he had understood her better, when she was a product of her parents. What she was now was what she herself had decided to become (222)." Hana's relationship with each of the men in the villa shaped her differently. She didn't submit to what Caravaggio wanted from her but rather found love and companionship with Kip and the patient. The war was a catalyst for her independence from her parents, and her newfound strength from being a nurse for so many years translates into her willingness to understand and empathize with others.

"The Cave of Swimmers"

So you want to know how to fall in love? This chapter may not show you the best way to express your feelings for another person, but it does give us more insight into the relationship between the patient and Katharine. Katharine's character was hard to understand when first learning about her time with the patient. She was this socialite wife who suddenly threw away her young marriage for the patient, abusing both men in the process. This chapter explains the shift she went through as she grew to love the desert:

"After that month in Cairo she was muted, read constantly, kept more to herself, as if something had occurred or she realized suddenly that wondrous thing about the human being, it can change. She did not have to remain a socialite who had married an adventurer. She was discovering herself (230)."

It doesn't get blunter than that. The freedom that the desert embodies gave Katharine an outlet to fully express her desires. She was no longer the young rich stereotype that Clifton married, so it only makes sense that their marriage would fail and she would fall for someone who was just as fascinated with freedom: the patient. The patient's connection with Katharine and his years of exploration are described extensively, but what I always wondered about was how these memories affect his time in the villa. His present self is not very expressive of how he feels about his past. He merely just tells it like a story that is separate from himself. The chapter ends with him completely emotionless and the narrator finally refers to him as Almàsy, revealing that he is in fact, not English.

"August"

In my opinion, the final chapter of this novel fully encapsulates the most major issues that each character faced for the past few months in the villa. It begins with a celebration of Hana's birthday. A celebration of the small community they built together. It ends with Kip leaving in anger and Almàsy wishing to die.

When Kip hears that an atomic bomb was dropped on Japan, he immediately turns his back on the bond he built with Almàsy, pointing a gun at him. He expresses his plights with having to convert to English practices and culture:

"Your fragile white island that with customs and manners and books and prefects and reason somehow converted the rest of the world. You stood for precise behavior. I knew if I lifted a teacup with the wrong finger I'd be banished. If I tied the wrong kind of knot in a tie I was out (283)."

Kip's biggest challenge in the book has been with his identity. He's been forced to, for his own survival, adapt to a whole new culture while still being called the Sikh or the sapper. The atomic bomb symbolizes a betrayal to the east despite people like Kip doing everything they can to fit in with the English, and it sets him over the edge. He leaves on a motorcycle, only to reach a day where the rain is so severe that he skids off the road and into a river, where we are uncertain if he survives or not. Meanwhile, Almàsy wanted Kip to pull the trigger when faced with death. It is the first time that Almàsy truly expresses how he feels in his dying state with such a traumatizing past. He's also the only character who we know the fate of, as it stated in the first chapter that he would eventually die in the villa.

In between parts of Kip's journey out of the villa and towards the river, Hana writes a letter to her Aunt Clara, the only living family member of hers that we know of. She tells Clara of her bottled up feelings about her Father's death and the guilt she feels for not being there when he was dying of burn injuries: 

"He was a burned man and I was a nurse and I could have nursed him. Do you understand the sadness of geography? I could have saved him or at least been with him till the end. I know a lot about burning (298)."

Although she was a nurse to Almàsy, she could not do the same for her own father, with war tearing them apart from each other. The most important message that I've taken from this book is that war tears people apart. It brings out the worst in people and the most horrible of circumstances for others. The way that Ondaatje utilizes these characters to show this makes the effects of world war 2 all the more personal to read.

Thank you so much for following my opinions on The English Patient. Remember to check back next week for my last post!