A Postmodern Narratological Study On The English Patient

The English Patient is the most famous work of Michael Ondaatje,which tells a story of four war-scarred people gathering in a ruined Italian villa towards the end of World War II.Although the war draws to a close,the trauma is hard to cure.After its publication,The English Patient has won worldwide acclaim.In 1992,This novel won the Governor General's Award,the Booker Prize as well as The Golden Man Booker Prize.Tony Morrison believes that “The English Patient wears triple crown: it is profound,beautiful and heart-quickening”.Scholars from home and abroad interpret The English Patient from various perspectives,among which post-colonialism,cultural identity,narratology,feminism and religion are often covered.Some scholars have noted the unique narrative style of The English Patient,but a postmodern narratological study on this novel is rarely seen so far.Based on postmodern narratological theory,this thesis attempts to explore the employment of postmodern writing strategies by analyzing narrative time,narrative contents and narrative space of this novel.In so doing,it intends to argue that all those postmodern narrative strategies contribute to exploring into the theme of war trauma of the novel.This thesis contains three parts: chapter one centers on the nonlinear narrative of The English Patient.With disappeared time,juxtaposed narrative lines and disrupted plots,the nonlinear narrative breaks the boundaries of time.Painful past,discouraging present and uncertain future tangle together.Four characters are all trapped in an intertwined net of despair.Chapter two focuses on petit narrative in The English Patient.Different from familiar historical novel,personal experience is highlighted in The English Patient.Characters of this novel are marginal figures in wartimes,and one of them is even of great moral ambiguity.Under the general background of war,petit narrative deconstructs the grand narrative of The Second World War,and therefore make the war trauma of ordinary people more prominent.Chapter three discusses the collage of two major narrative spaces.Every narrative space has its implied meaning.Desert is a symbol of “the ideal land”,villa “the place of redemption”.By juxtaposing both spaces,the sharp emotional conflicts and fragmented feelings inside every character are fully reflected.Moreover,both desert and villa are failed to be harbors of the characters to avoid or cure their war trauma,from which the irreversibility of mental damage caused by war is clearly manifested.Based on the above analysis,it intends to conclude that Ondaatje's employment of postmodern narrative strategies in The English Patient reveals the cruelty of war and the irreversible physical and psychological damage of people engendered by war,and therefore plays a significant role in conveying the theme of war trauma of the novel.