Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Study Guide for Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient"
    A Study Guide for Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient"
    A Study Guide for Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient"
    Ebook45 pages33 minutes

    A Study Guide for Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient"

    By Gale and Cengage

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJun 14, 2016
    ISBN9781535836432
    A Study Guide for Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient"

    Read more from Gale

    Related to A Study Guide for Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient"

    Related ebooks

    Teaching Methods & Materials For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      True Love is Feeding Yourself: On Melissa Broder’s ‘Milk Fed’

      Feb 17, 2021

      Milk Fed might make you hungry. Milk Fed might make you horny. Milk Fed might make you believe in god, or in love, or at least make you want to try. The post True Love is Feeding Yourself: On Melissa Broder’s ‘Milk Fed’ appeared first on The Millions

      3 min read

    • Article

      Me, Myself, and You: Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

      Apr 15, 2019

      In her latest novel, Rooney suggests that individual identity is actually a microcosmic social structure, made up of webbed relationships and collective agreements. The post Me, Myself, and You: Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’ appeared first on The Mi

      6 min read

    • Article

      Mohsin Hamid: “Migration is the Starting Point for Everybody”

      Mar 17, 2017

      This interview comes from Open Source, a weekly program about arts, ideas and politics. Listen to rest of the conversation here, including Mohsin Hamid reading passages from Exit West.   Make room for Mohsin Hamid on the long shelf of Indian and Pa

      15 min read

    • Article

      The Memory Police

      Aug 14, 2019

      The Memory Police
      1 min read

    • Article

      TV, FILM & RADIO

      Feb 16, 2023

      TV, FILM & RADIO
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un’s Notes

      Jun 30, 2021

      * Have Oldie-readers who wear glasses ever thought where specs come from? The answer lies in a new book, Through the Looking Glasses: The Spectacular Life of Spectacles, by Travis Elborough. Elborough, himself bespectacled, traces the history of spec

      6 min read

    • Article

      Writer, Warrior, Witness.

      Mar 24, 2020

      Writer, Warrior, Witness.
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Power Of Living

      May 5, 2020

      The Power Of Living
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Old Un’s Notes

      Nov 17, 2021

      The Old Un’s Notes
      4 min read

    • Article

      Top 10 novels about postwar Germany | Martin Goodman

      Apr 13, 2022

      My mother, with her wartime childhood, refused to set foot on German soil. But in 1975, I was headed to Berlin. At the airport, she took the gold Virgin Mary from her neck and placed it around mine. Till then my life had been enveloped in a “Britain-

      4 min read

    • Article

      Anne Frank

      Jan 21, 2022

      Anne Frank
      4 min read

    • Article

      Robert Clary, The Last Star Of The 'Hogan's Heroes,' Dies At 96

      Nov 18, 2022

      A French-born survivor of Nazi concentration camps during World War II, Robert Clary began his career in entertainment as a nightclub singer.

      3 min read

    • Article

      World At War

      Mar 8, 2024

      By JOSEPH O’CONNOR Vintage In 1943 the Nazis invaded Rome, with the city ruled by the vicious Gestapo commander Paul Hauptmann. The Vatican, an independent country within the city, was neutral territory and off limits to Hitler’s thugs. As the Occup

      3 min read

    • Article

      ‘Secret Diaries Told Dad’s Ww2 Story’

      May 5, 2020

      As a girl, I knew that my dad had been a prisoner of war, but I also knew it was something that we must never speak of,” says author and poet Maggie Brookes. “Dad and I were very close, but there was a gap in my understanding of him.” The missing pie

      2 min read

    • Article

      Rachelle Unreich

      Nov 9, 2023

      Rachelle Unreich
      2 min read

    • Article

      The Style & Technique Of BEN MACINTYRE

      Mar 5, 2020

      ‘If you’re looking for a good spy thriller, I definitely recommend this,’ said a review in the Daily Express. The book was not an invented spy yarn, but a true story – Agent Zigzag. Fact can be stranger than fiction. Ben Macintyre, historian and Time

      6 min read

    • Article

      Force For Good

      Apr 16, 2023

      These days, “resilience” has become a somewhat hackneyed word. But not for Inge Woolf. The Holocaust survivor, who found love, prosperity, acceptance and influence as an émigré to New Zealand, once declared that resilience was “the hope to see there

      7 min read

    • Article

      Summer Reading

      Jan 1, 2020

      A wealthy bibliophile brings a treasured manuscript to her Paris binder. The pages are creased, yellowed and pungent with the nutty aroma “that old paper exhales as it decays”, and underneath the title is a jumble of figures. The book is broken up in

      7 min read

    • Article

      ‘May Braved danger In Shanghai’

      Oct 18, 2022

      Between the early 1800s and the mid-20th century, thousands of European Christians chose to spread the faith in China as missionaries. However, mortality rates were high due to disease, living conditions could be primitive, and learning the language

      2 min read

    • Article

      Necrolog

      Jun 16, 2022

      John Nicholson was the only child of Captain W Ivan Nicholson and Eleanor (Nella) Zollner, daughter of the Danish Consul. In 1946, when John was six, the family moved to Flying Rat Cottage in Great Dunmow, Essex, where they kept poultry, plus a goat

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Hand Of Friendship

      Aug 24, 2021

      The Hand Of Friendship
      6 min read

    • Article

      Hidden Histories

      Nov 25, 2021

      Edgar Mittelholzer was a Guyanese novelist who should be remembered not just for the quality of his writing, but as the earliest recorded writer from the Caribbean to make his living from the profession. I studied Caribbean literature at university,

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Study Guide for Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient"

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Michael Ondaatje's "The English Patient" - Gale

      1

      The English Patient

      Michael Ondaatje

      1992

      Introduction

      The English Patient tells the stories of four individuals whose lives come together at the end of World War II in an abandoned Italian villa: Hana, a 20-year-old nurse from Canada who seeks refuge from the proliferation of wartime death; Kirpal (Kip) Singh, a 25-year-old sapper, or bomb dismantler, from India who is a member of the British Army; David Caravaggio, a friend of Hana's father who worked as a spy during the war and was severely disfigured while a captive of the Germans; and Hana's patient, a severely burned man whose identity is the mystery at the heart of this novel. Each of these characters finds him or herself far away from home, displaced by the war, and each of them finds a quiet refuge in the abandoned Italian villa to reconstruct their lives. While Hana and Kip eventually develop a romantic relationship, Caravaggio becomes more and more obsessed with the patient's true identity: Caravaggio believes that the patient may not be English, as everyone assumed, but a Hungarian who worked as a spy for the Germans. Interspersed into the story of the lives of these characters together in Italy are each character's clear recollections of the past, including the patient's hallucinatory memories of a torrid love affair, of desert exploration, and of friendship and betrayal. The novel becomes a collage of memories that explores themes of war, nationality, identity, loss, and love.

      Michael Ondaatje, previously known as a poet, received immense critical and popular acclaim for The English Patient. The book earned The Booker Prize for best novel of 1992.

      Author Biography

      Poet and novelist Michael Ondaatje is perhaps best-known for his novel The English Patient, which focuses on an international group of characters isolated together in an abandoned Italian villa at the end of World War II. The novel explores themes of nationhood, identity, and displacement; the exploration of such themes seems to have arisen from Ondaatje's own life experiences. He was born in Colombo, Sri Lanka, on September 12, 1943, to parents Philip Mervyn Ondaatje and Doris Gratiaen. Ondaatje's family was what is known as Burgher—a minority but affluent class of people descended from the South Asian island's non-British European colonists. He spent his early childhood in Sri Lanka; after his parents divorced, he moved with his mother and siblings to England. He subsequently moved to Canada, where he attended the University of Toronto, graduating with a bachelor's degree in 1965. His experience of inhabiting several countries throughout his life, and his multi-ethnically influenced childhood, have greatly informed and shaped the themes of his writing.

      Ondaatje started his writing career as a poet—in fact, his primary focus as a poet greatly influences the style of his prose. His first collection of poems, Dainty Monsters, was published in 1967. His first work of prose, Coming through Slaughter (1976), is an experimental biography of New Orleans

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1