Michael Ondaatje

Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient centers around ideas of identity. Each main character has its own identity story told in the book, and they all interconnect to form the storyline of rediscovered identity. One of the main subjects of the book presents itself in the title, and Ondaatje focuses much of his attention on the theme of Almasy, or the English patient, rediscovering his past traumatic experiences and life story. Much of the book focuses on his flashbacks and injuries as he and the other characters determine who he is and how he ended up in the hospital calling himself English. However, a contrasting theme that Ondaatje introduces centers around Kip, the Indian sapper who lives at the hospital with the English patient and the…

Reading The Cat’s Table was an eye opener for me as I watched Michael Ondaatje’s young characters make bad decisions and learn from their mistakes. The young narrator named Michael, narrates his 21-day journey at the age eleven as he travels across the world to live with his mother, someone he has really no relationship with. He encounters people on the ship who become his friends that later on help shape him as a person. Ondaatje continuously demonstrates Michael’s innocence which leads to…

wife-and him by the fact that there was now no way out of the desert. Only she was not dead. He pulled her body free, varying it out of the plane’s crumpled grip, this grip of her husband.”(137) This is clearly obsession as the EP is carrying his lovers dead body. 2. The consuming love between the EP and Katherine is evident when “On Hassanein Bey’s lawn- the grand old man of the 1923 expedition- she walked over with the government aide Roundell and shook my hand, “I want you to ravish me.”…

of her existence, spun through individual silk, piece by piece it eventually connects together to form a web that provides life for the spider, a new start. Though weaved with care it does have its limitations in strength, weak and miniature bugs will get caught, but the powerful and big will destroy the web. Incidentally, while reading Michael Ondaatje’s “In the Skin of a Lion”, Paulo Coelho’s “The winner stands alone”, I begin to question what the purpose in reading is? Tired of flipping…

Michael Ondaatje’s semi-autobiographical account, entitled Running in the Family, describes Ondaatje’s journey back to the beginning, to Ceylon where he was born into a privileged family, a mixed group of Sinhalese, Dutch, and Tamil origin. The story of his family is a journey through memory and imagination as he attempts to piece together the adventurous and carefree life his immediate family once led – more importantly, the life his father once lived. Although Running in the Family is…

Everyone ask the question ‘who am I’ this question has no black and white answer, but is answered through how people act in situation, opinions, thoughts and perspective as well as actions and feelings, but there is infinite possibilities to why someone is who they are, all very personal realization the individual has to explore. Both Ransom Riggs and Michael Ondaatje explore this in their novels Miss Peregrine's Home For Peculiar Children and The Cat’s Table as they both tell a story about…

one side of the story being told. In Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Ondaatje uses an unconventional style of narration to tell the untold stories of the working class and immigrants who built the country, to give immigrants a voice they do not have in the past, and to recreate how certain memories have a major impact while some do not. Through this style, Ondaatje emphasizes the main topic of the novel, the perspective of immigrants and working class in the nineteen- thirties.…

that can claim in some of artistic beauty. The writer’s opinion is a way of communicate through the written words with arrogant judgment, from the Literature waterfall from long Canadian Literature river. A great literature presupposes an advanced and well integrated society, a mature body and self-conscious soul. The stirring records of explorers and pioneers by discovery and exploration, confederation agreements and purchase, the frontiers were ultimately set. Here by mixture of both frontier…

Michael Ondaatje in Coming Through Slaughter presents his own take on the man credited with the invention of jazz, Buddy Bolden. The book is a fictional rendition of Bolden’s years before he was diagnosed as mentally ill. By using the character of Bolden, descriptive passages of music and style, Ondaatje shows how transience pervades the work of an artist and how the artist is quickly forgotten. The character of Buddy Bolden is based on the real Charles Bolden. Charles Bolden is considered to…

With even a passing reading of his poetry, it is quite evident that Michael Ondaatje has a strong fascination with markings and the meanings they entail. From poem to poem, the marks range in how they are presented: sometimes they are sensory and other times they are emotional. In The Time Around Scars, the markings are discussed as if they were physical wounds. Meanwhile, the markings of The Cinnamon Peeler come in the form of scents. In keeping with his style, Ondaatje loads the markings in…