Water In Anil's Ghost

Symbolic Interpretations of Water Water is the most important nutrient for all life on earth and arguably the most significant factor in economic development. Within Sri Lanka, the entire island’s biome and economy are dependent on two yearly monsoons to supply water to the land. This intense period of rainfall is an extraordinary phenomenon from which culture and tradition is built around. In the novel Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, Anil revisits her childhood home in Sri Lanka as a forensic pathologist in an effort to investigate human ethics and struggles with her thoughts on the country. Despite growing up in Sri Lanka, Anil’s perspective on the country completely changes as the result of her education in America. It is evident that …show more content…
Despite not explicitly expressing her dislike for her home country, she hints her detest though her memories and opinions on water while also objectifying a personal bias towards Sri Lankans through a symbolic reference to water. Within her flashback to her early life, the appearance of water in a different light projects her thoughts on how she finds disgust in Sri Lanka’s natural environment. Where she once saw water as pristine, she now imagines it as dirty. In addition, Anil expresses disrespect for culture in Sri Lanka through her views on rainfall. She is apathetic about monsoons and thinks of this natural phenomenon as only a reason for the country to have a temporary fix to a rising problem which essentially signifies her lack of cultural principles. The link between the name Sailor and the skeleton reveals her bias towards the corruptive nature of the majority of Sri Lankans. The word Sailor is a representation of Sri Lankans and she associates this word with a dead body that she abruptly identifies as a political murder without concise evidence. Although Anil was brought up in Sri Lanka, she does not hold the same love for her country as she once did. Instead of remaining in Sri Lanka for her entire life, Anil was able to educate herself in America and this allowed her to open her eyes to an entirely new breadth of the world that she did not see as a child. Although an individual may be born in a certain area, he or she does not have an inherit link to be bound to that specific area. The place where one calls “home” does not have to be a place of birth or derived from ethnicity rather “home” is where a person sincerely