Texts that highlight the stratification of groups in society and the perpetual pursuit of self-identity will always endure through time. Michael Ondaatje’s historiographical 1987 novel, In the Skin of a Lion, addresses these two themes to a significant extent to convey his ultimate message about the migrant experience and inaccuracy of official histories. In using a post-modernist structure and style Ondaatje attacks the notion of the Grand Narrative whilst the struggle of the migrant assimilation is brought out using the deeper concept of language. Finally the cognitive transparency provided about Patrick’s thoughts and his experiences illuminate the re-definition of self-identity. We as the audience in reading In the Skin of a Lion experience
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In our realisation is that the text is a construct, elucidating an inherent property of the grand narrative. The distortion of time occurs again in “Already he knew it could not be lightning bugs, the last of summer’s fireflies had died in the folds of one of his handkerchiefs”, the effect of involving the reader to deduce meaning again. Following this, the event of the Finnish skaters with the flaming whips occurs, later to reappear in a conversation with Alice in Patrick’s adult life. Here Ondaatje places a scene which is a flashback of Patrick’s life, along with a scene essential to Alice’s flashback, both within a flashback of Patrick’s childhood. This instance of the malleability of time however, is more subtle, an instance where Ondaatje’s prowess is lauded by critic Douglas Barbour in 1993 “Passages of cross references in time pass by so smoothly we rarely notice them”. Thus Ondaatje is able to both overtly move the reader to recognise the novel as a construct whilst also engaging in playfulness of time in a more subtle manner to create the effect subconsciously, both however intent of destabilising the grand narrative by exposing it as a construct. Patrick’s letters to Clara after she leaves him at Union station cause a shift from third person narration to first person, the epistolary section overtly engaging a reader and accentuating the message that the novel like official history is a construct. Post-modernist concern of the constructiveness of history is brought out using historical allusion and intertextuality in the passage of “Arthur Goss, the city photographer…unhooks the cord of lights…and climbs out into the sunlight. Work continues. The grunt into hard clay. The wet slap”. Ondaatje appropriates a historical figure of Arthur Goss into a character,
In our realisation is that the text is a construct, elucidating an inherent property of the grand narrative. The distortion of time occurs again in “Already he knew it could not be lightning bugs, the last of summer’s fireflies had died in the folds of one of his handkerchiefs”, the effect of involving the reader to deduce meaning again. Following this, the event of the Finnish skaters with the flaming whips occurs, later to reappear in a conversation with Alice in Patrick’s adult life. Here Ondaatje places a scene which is a flashback of Patrick’s life, along with a scene essential to Alice’s flashback, both within a flashback of Patrick’s childhood. This instance of the malleability of time however, is more subtle, an instance where Ondaatje’s prowess is lauded by critic Douglas Barbour in 1993 “Passages of cross references in time pass by so smoothly we rarely notice them”. Thus Ondaatje is able to both overtly move the reader to recognise the novel as a construct whilst also engaging in playfulness of time in a more subtle manner to create the effect subconsciously, both however intent of destabilising the grand narrative by exposing it as a construct. Patrick’s letters to Clara after she leaves him at Union station cause a shift from third person narration to first person, the epistolary section overtly engaging a reader and accentuating the message that the novel like official history is a construct. Post-modernist concern of the constructiveness of history is brought out using historical allusion and intertextuality in the passage of “Arthur Goss, the city photographer…unhooks the cord of lights…and climbs out into the sunlight. Work continues. The grunt into hard clay. The wet slap”. Ondaatje appropriates a historical figure of Arthur Goss into a character,