The English Patient

Alfred A. Knopf Inc.: Excerpt from “Arrival at the Waldorf” by Wallace Stevens from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. Copyright 1954 by Wallace Stevens. Reprinted by permission.

Macmillan Publishing Company: Excerpts from Unexploded Bomb: A History of Bomb Disposal by Major A. B. Hartley. Copyright © 1958 by Major A. B. Hartley. Copyright renewed. Published in 1958 by Cassell 8c Co., London, and in 1959 by W. W. Norton 8c Co., New York. Reprinted by permission of Macmillan Publishing Company.

Edward B. Marks Music Company: Excerpt from “Manhattan” by Lorenz Hart and Richard Rodgers. Copyright 1925 by Edward B. Marks Music Company. Copyright renewed. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Penguin USA: Excerpts from “Buckingham Palace” from When We Were Very Young by A. A. Milne. Copyright 1924 by E. P. Dutton. Copyright renewed 1952 by A. A. Milne. Reprinted by permission of Dutton Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc.

The Royal Geographical Society: Excerpt from article by John Ball, Director of Desert Surveys in Egypt (1927), from The Geographical Journal, Vol. LXX, pp. 21–38, 105–129; and excerpt from the minutes of the Royal Geographical Society meeting of November 194-, London. Copyright by the Royal Geographical Society. Reprinted by permission.

Warner/Chappell Music, Inc.: Excerpt from “I Can’t Get Started” by Vernon Duke and Ira Gershwin. Copyright 1935 by Chappell 8c Co. (Copyright renewed). All rights reserved. Used by permission.

Williamson Music Co.: Excerpt from “I’ll Be Seeing You” by Sammy Fain and Irving Kahal. Copyright 1938 by Williamson Music Co. Copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved.

The English Patient Reader’s Guide

1. The English patient “whispers again, dragging the listening heart of the young nurse beside him to wherever his mind is, into that well of memory he kept plunging into during those months before he died” [this page]. Why does the patient consider himself to have “died”? Does he undergo any kind of rebirth during the course of the story?

2. What can you deduce from the novel about Hana’s relationship with her father? Has her father’s death, and the manner of it, caused her to retreat from the war and devote herself to the English patient? What influence do her feelings for her father have upon her relationship with Caravaggio?

3. Why did Hana decide to have an abortion during the war? How has that decision affected her, and how much influence has it had on her life at the villa?

4. How does the landscape of the novel–the Villa San Girolamo, the country around it, and the boundary between the two–reflect the inner lives of its inhabitants? Why do you think that Ondaatje has chosen Tuscany as the setting for his story? What significance do other landscapes, like the desert and the English countryside, hold for the story and its characters?

5. The English patient says, “I believe in such cartography—to be marked by nature, not just to label ourselves on a map like the names of rich men and women on buildings. We are communal histories, communal books” [this page]. How does Ondaatje use maps and cartography as a metaphor for people and history? What does geography mean to the English patient and to Ondaatje’s other characters?

6. Why has Ondaatje made Caravaggio a thief by profession? What is it in his character that makes such an occupation appropriate? “All his life he has avoided permanent intimacy” [this page]. Does Caravaggio change during the course of the novel? Does he ever come to accept intimacy, and if so, what type of intimacy and intimacy with whom?

7. The imagery at the beginning of the novel likens the patient to Christ. Later, Caravaggio says to Hana, “You don’t love him, you adore him,” to which she answers, “He is a saint” [this page]. Who else is likened to a saint, and why? Where else in the novel can you find religious imagery, and what is its purpose? The night before the Hiroshima explosion Kip sleeps in a church. What is the subject of the painting he sees there, and what is its thematic relation to the imminent atomic explosion?

8. “I came to hate nations,” says the English patient. “We are deformed by nation-states” [this page]. How does the desert negate the idea of nations? What sort of supra-national unity is experienced by the Europeans drawn to the desert, and how does each of them respond to the beginning of war? What alternate view of geography and history does the desert offer?