The English Patient

3- Katharine Clifton:

• An Oxford-educated woman and one of the most mysterious characters in the novel.

• She is the wife of Geoffrey Clifton. She married Geoffrey quite young and traveled with him to Northern Africa, after one year from their marriage. They fly to the desert to join Almásy's expedition crew.

• Katharine nevertheless takes what she wants, assertively approaching Almásy and telling him that she wants him to "ravish her".

• Geoffrey is a faithful and kind husband. Although of that Katharine never seems sorry about her affair. She punches and stabs her lover, angry at him for refusing to change and bravely challenging the world to recognize their relationship.

4- Caravaggio:

• A Canadian thief whose profession is to steal the important documents during the war when he puts his skills to use for the British intelligence effort.

• He is also long-time friend of Hana's father.• Caravaggio arrives in the villa as "the man with bandaged hands". His German captors cut off his thumbs and he is physically and mentally, can no longer steal, because he has "lost his nerve".

• Hana remembers Caravaggio as a very human thief. He would always get distracted by the human element in a job. For instance, if an advent calendar was on the wrong day, he would fix it. She also has deep feelings of love for Caravaggio. It is debated if this love is romantic or simply familial, however Caravaggio does display a romantic love towards Hana.

5- Kip:

• An Indian soldier who had a difficult life at war and at home. He is also trained to be a sapper by Lord Suffolk.

• Kip's emotional withdrawal because when Lord Suffolk and his team are killed while attempting to dismantle a new type of bomb, which detonated. After this event, Kip decides to leave England and work as a sapper in Italy where he meets Hana.

• Kip and Hana become lovers and, through that, Kip begins to regain confidence and a sense of community. He feels welcomed by these westerners, and they all seem to form a group that disregards origins. They get together and celebrate Hana's twenty-first birthday. However, Kip hears news of America's dropping a bomb on Japan and conclude that the West can never reconcile with the East, and that America would never have done something so horrific to a White population. So he leaves and never returns back.

6- Geoffrey Clifton :

. A British explorer and Katharine Clifton's husband. A young, good-natured, affable man, Geoffrey is a new addition to the group of explorers who are mapping the North African desert.

.Geoffrey seems to have everything going for him: an Oxford education, wealthy family connections, and a beautiful young wife. He is a proud and devoted husband, and enjoys praising his wife in front of the other explorers.

.Goeffrey claims to have come to North Africa purely out of an interest in exploration, but Almásy finds out that Geoffrey has been working for British Intelligence as an aerial photographer. Everyone seems to like Geoffrey, but Katharine, who knows him best, knows his capacity to be insanely jealous.

7- Madox :

.Almásy's best friend in the desert. Madox is a rational, level-headed man who, like Almásy, chose to live in the desert to study the features of the land and report back to the Geographical Society.

.Unlike Almásy, Madox includes his own emotional reactions in his writing and reports, and is not shy to describe his amazement at a particular mountain or his wonder at the size of the moon.

.Madox always carries a copy of Anna Karenina, the famous tale of adultery, but remains ever faithful to his wife back home. Madox sees the church as proclaiming a jingoistic pro-war message during World War II. He takes his own life in the church, and Almásy concludes that he 'died because of nations.'

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Themes:

Nationality and Identity

- Nationality and identity are interconnected in The English Patient, functioning together to create a web of inescapable structures that tie the characters to certain places and times despite their best efforts to evade such confinement.

-This reality invades Almásy's life in the desert and Kip's life in the Italian villa.

-National identity is, then, an inescapable part of each of the characters, a larger force over which they have no control.

Love's Ability to Transcend Time and Place

.One theme that emerges in the novel is that love, if it is truly heartfelt, transcends place and time.

-Hana feels love and connection to her father even though he has died.

-Almásy desperately maintains his love for Katharine.

-Kip, despite leaving Italy to marry in India, never loses his connection to Hana.

-Such love transcends even death, as the characters hold onto their emotions even past the grave. This idea implies a larger message—that time and place themselves are irrelevant to human connection.

Motifs :

Bodies

-The frequent recurrence of descriptions of bodies in the novel informs and develops its themes of healing, changing, and renewal. -Almásy's burned body.

- Kip's dark and lithe body.

-Katharine's willowy figure.

-Bodies thus function as a means of physical connections between characters, tying them to a certain times and places.

Dying in a Holy Place

-The characters in the novel frequently mention the idea of "dying in a holy place." -Katharine dies in a cave .

-Hana's father also dies in a holy place, a dove-cot, a ledge above a building where doves can be safe from predatory rats.

-Madox dies in a holy place by taking his life in a church in England.

-the figurative idea of a 'holy place' touches on the connection between actual places and states of emotion in the novel.

Reading

-Reading is recurs throughout the novel in various forms and capacities.

-Hana reads to Almásy to connect with him and try to make him interested in the present life.

-Katharine reads voraciously to learn all she can about Cairo and the desert.

-Almásy consistently reads The Histories by Herodotus to guide him in his geographical searches.

- In each of these instances of reading, the characters use books to inform their own lives and to connect to another place or time.

Symbols :

The Atomic Bomb

-The atomic bomb the United States drops on Japan symbolizes the worst fears of western aggression.

The Italian villa

-depiction of the villa is symbolically important to the novel.

-Hana reflects to herself that "there seemed little demarcation between house and landscape."- Such an image mirrors the spiritual death and rebirth of the villa's inhabitants, the way they learn to live again after the emotional destruction of war.

~.~

.The novel, the English patient, by Michael Ondaatje constructs meaning through the use of tropes, images and symbolism, instead of portraying a linear set of event.

. There are many intersexual references, tropes of covering, which serve to create and strengthen meaning, as well as bold imagery, which erects another level of significance.

. Symbolism plays a vital role in the formation of meaning, with fire, religion, the English patient body and the desert being essential to founding concepts of the novel.

. Ondaatje novel is a collage, its narrative structure is not based on chronological events but is constructed largely of numerous non –sequential memories and experiences of the four main characters. This non –linear narrative structure, however, is more than a narrative device.

. Setting the novel during world warII also gives Ondaatje a backdrop through which to examine the effect of the effect of the colonialism of Britain on the world policies of the United States in later years. World warII marked the end.

. Of Britain’s powerful colonial era, and the rise of the United States as the new world power. The emergences of the United State as the world power is metaphorically represented, in the novel, by the bombing of Hiroshima. Through the character of Kip, Ondaatje shows how American rational to bomb Japan with atomic bomb is directly related to the racist colonialist philosophy of western superiority that especially characterized the British Empires rule over its non –western.