Incurable Wounds Of War: The English Patient Essay - 1,431 words

Incurable Wounds of war: The English Patient The English Patient won Michael Ondaatje, a Canadian novelist and poet, the 1993 Booker Prize. It is a very rich novel, very stylistically written. May be having read the very first pages somebody will say that this story is boring, others might not understand how one could make a film out of it or even win such a prestigious prize as Booker Prize. But this story draws our attention to the very important issue: war and wounds it can cause. He does not speak only about physical wounds, when one looses his arm or leg but he underlines the horrors of war toward the human side of a human being. The novel reveals the very truth about any war. It is such a short word, only three letters, but the wounds these short word causes might never be cured and may even destroy everything human left inside of our bodies.


Ondaatje tells about four individuals whose lives have been damaged by the war. War is never led for good sake, or love, or peace. War itself is evil in its essence. War causes death and it must not be particularly a physical death of body, but it is always death of soul and heart. All the best human feelings are dashed by war and you never know when these will be recovered and even whether these will ever be recovered. No one in this foursome is whole, emotionally or physically or both, and each seeks renewal from the others.


The story of the English patient narrates about four people, a woman and three men, who all meet during the later stages of World War II in a damaged villa north of Florence. They are usual people, who do not differ from any others, who also suffered from the World War II like our great-grandfathers and grandfathers. Each of them has his own story, his own past and hopefully will have his own future. But the war took away their present and left nothing instead, except a deep wound which seems never to heel. It took away their identity and thus they all feel lost and try to find their place in this world. First there is the nurse, Hana, a young woman with a generous heart. Hana is only 20 years old but already fatigued and dispassionate. She has lost her father in the war, and later on her lover too. Although it is not right to say: SHE has lost, but rather: the war took away her father and her love. This young woman is already so immune to death that she fears she has lost the capacity to feel. She walks around the villa like an empty shell tending to the mysterious patient.


Hana is unable to accept the death of her father, neither she will be able to accept the death of her lover. Hana suffers from her own emotional shell shock. She blames herself: I must be a curse. Anybody I love or get close to is killed. She is scared that her heart wont be able to feel all the good feelings it used to feel. But no war can take away everything. Hana finds strength in herself and decides to setup a small hospital in an old monastery to take care of a dieing patient who does not have any chance to live. Anyway Hana is ready to stay in a lost and forgotten place but just to help this man at least to die in peace. She constantly tries to keep up life in him, although she herself is exhausted by war.


Finally Hana finds inspiration in a young man, an Indian sapper. Her relationship with him can not be called a real, true love, it was more their mutual desperate hunger for at least some kind of feeling which could give them both strength to go on. But at that time, when there was only war, hate and destruction around them, they took this feeling as a chance for them both finally to understand their roles a meaning each one of them had for another one. And they took this chance but the war would never let them cure the wounds the war itself has caused. Kip, a Sikh sapper, has lost himself fighting the war ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

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Essay Tags: patient, wound, world war ii, hana, young woman

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