A Study On Resilience In Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient

The renowned Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje has worked on multiple genres,covering an abundance of themes.His The English Patient has won him the 1992 Booker Prize and has profoundly influenced the literary world.Set in a deserted villa,the novel brings together four different characters from various cultural backgrounds,all of them traumatized by the Second World War.Much of the critical scholarship has touched upon the motif of trauma and healing,but the focus is generally put on ways of external therapy from a literary perspective and the simplified process of recovery.As for the internal mechanism of recovery,which is represented as resilience,scholars have not paid sufficient attention.Writing from a psychological perspective,this thesis shifts the focus and explores the mechanism of resilience and healing through the study of characterization.As a notion used in traumatic studies in the psychological field,resilience is depicted as the ability of the traumatized patient to recover and reenter the normal life gradually.It is more a dynamic process than a static state,and it can be achieved through moving and bouncing between opposing poles of different mental states.While trauma emphasizes the frozen and static moment that cannot be integrated into consciousness,resilience is bolstered through movement and fluidity.Based on some psychological research findings,this thesis employs the three sets of opposing motifs of “speech and silence”(the verbal resilience),“isolation and reconnection”(the sociable resilience),and “meaning and absurdity”(the cognitive resilience)to expand the connotation of resilience in the context of the novel.Focusing on the characters of Hana,Kip,and the patient Almasy,this thesis presents the process of their movement from silence,isolation,and absurdity to speech,reconnection and meaning.The characters’ seemingly paradoxical behaviors are evidence of their ambivalence between opposing poles.These movements indicate that as the characters try to access but get repelled by trauma,the increasing fluidity facilitates the development of resilience.In this way,the characters begin to step outof trauma and set foot on recovery.