Erasure Of Boundaries: The Theme Of Identity In The English Patient

The English patient is a novel written by Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje. Published in1992, it won the Booker Prize and the Governor General's Award. Its film edition in1996 won 9 Academy Awards, which makes the novel more well-known. Up to now, the English patient has been a classic novel in English literature.The novel has a complicated structure with multiple themes. Focuses on the subjects like country, nation, war, identity, multiculture, etc make it a novel typical of post-colonial features. The novel is set in a dilapidated villa in Italy during the period of the World War Two, telling of the stories of four characters who suffered seriously in the war and the villa became their healing place. The identity problem is one of the main topics that the novel concerns. The four characters in the novel are all confused by their identity. Identity problems in the novel are divided into three categories: the identity under the multicultural background, the identity of the colonized and the identity of the immigrants. Based on certain concepts in the postcolonial studies like country, other and subaltern, this thesis analyzes the specific cases of identity problem each character was faced with in the novel.The 1st chapter deals with the multicultural identity problem, pointing out that the English patient's identity problem derives from the contradiction between his multicultural background and the traditional identity view. This chapter also analyses the way how the novel deconstructs the essence of country from history and territory, therefore, to further deconstruct the essence of identity.The 2nd chapter focuses on the identity of the colonized, holding that Kip is destined to be an other in the western world, as long as the conflict and contradiction exist between the west and the east.The 3rd chapter discusses the identity of the immigrants. By employing the concept of subaltern, this chapter argues that through the rewriting of the immigrant's history, the novel manages to bring the immigrants onto the historical stage and enables them to make out their own voices.By the writing of these three kinds of identity problems, the novel aims to cause people's attention to identity. Through the deconstruction of the essence of country, the novel puts forward one common way to solve the identity problems. This thesis points out that, by erasing boundaries between cultures, identity problems disappear naturally and people of different countries, nations, races, etc are able to live together harmoniously and friendly.Erasure of boundaries is obviously ideal. Despite of this, in the period of globalization, with the flow of the population, identity problem has become a common topic. Thoughts on identity in the novel will be helpful to better understand the situation we are facing.