Traumatic Writing:the Mutilation In The English Patient

As one of those writers who have acquired international recognition through cross-cultural writing,Michael Ondaatje's most well-known work,The English Patient,was an immediate success when it came out in 1992 by winning the Booker Prize,followed by other important awards such as the Governor General's Award. The story tells that in the summer of 1945 when the second World War was about to end, four people from different countries gathered in an Italian villa, taking with them their own etchings gained from the war.A host of scholars have studied this work from various perspectives, among which the post-colonialism, the trans-nationalism, and the post-modernism are three major ones. The first two aspects, based on the cross-cultural background of the novelist and the hybridity of the character's identity, examine the "unique practice of identification" done by the writer and his aspiration for the transcendence of nationalism. By analyzing the writing skills employed by the writer, post-modern studies reveal some existential themes such as the meaninglessness and uncertainty of human life. This dissertation will discuss, through close reading and by centering on the numerous tropes of mutilation pervading the text,how Ondaatje manages to present trauma through the writing of war and history.This dissertation consists of five parts, with the first being Introduction and the last Conclusion. The main body includes three chapters: Chapter One argues about the unique way that the writer renders in depicting the war to represent trauma, and the argumentation is propped up by a detailed discussion of the tropes of mutilation, including the four mutilated characters and the mutilated images including the moonlight and the villa.Chapter Two analyzes the three skills, namely, intertextuality, time and space, and repeated narrative used by the writer to re-write history, representing mutilation and trauma. Chapter Three mainly argues that the racial and colonial conflicts, the class conflict within the colonial power are the root causes of mutilation, which suggest that the trauma is thus unrecoverable.