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Irony
Definition of Metaphor
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor can be stated explicitly, as... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other. The comparison in a metaphor... read full definition
A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares two different things by saying that one thing is the other... read full definition
Chapter II. In Near Ruins
Explanation and Analysis—Buried Speech:
In Chapter 2 of The English Patient, the narrator reveals pieces of Hana's backstory as a nurse, before she arrived at the villa San Girolamo. Hana's experiences caring for battle-torn patients during World War II leaves Hana with an immense amount of trauma, which Ondaatje evokes using a metaphor regarding Hana's speech:
Throughout the war, with all of her worst patients, she survived by keeping a coldness hidden in her role as nurse. I will survive this. I won’t fall apart at this. These were buried sentences all through her war, all through the towns they crept towards and through [...]
In the passage above, as Hana describes the difficulties she endured during the war, the reader learns that she treats her self-motivation as “buried sentences." These sentences of self-motivation—indeed, self-preservation—are not buried in a literal sense, as one would bury a body, but in a metaphorical sense. As a nurse whose task is solely to care for others, Hana must push aside both her mental and physical pain. Given the immense scale of destruction during any war, but particularly World War II as destructive military technologies developed, Hana cannot form emotional bonds with her patients. To do so might shatter her already-fragile capabilities and thus render her incapable of performing her work. However, her private determination that she "will survive this" and "won't fall apart at this" reveals her inner strength as a character and caretaker. Additionally, the metaphor of self-motivation as "buried sentences" exposes a tragic reality of war: its massive scale can force caretakers to lose a sense of their own humanity when tending to others.
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Explanation and Analysis—The Placenta:
As the English patient lies bed-bound in the Italian villa after being rescued from his aviation crash, Hana grapples with the reality of becoming his full-time caretaker. Burdened with war trauma herself, she finds it difficult to sleep and often spends time in deep reminiscence over her first encounters with the fragile and scarred patient. In Chapter 2, Ondaatje compares the English patient to an unborn baby, crafting a metaphor to illustrate how war injuries have almost infantilized the patient:
In the Pisa hospital she had seen the English patient for the first time. A man with no face. An ebony pool. All identification consumed in a fire. [...] Sometimes she collects several blankets and lies under them, enjoying the warmth they bring. And when moonlight slides onto the ceiling it wakes her, and she lies in the hammock, her mind skating. [...] Her legs move under the burden of military blankets. She swims in their wool as the English patient moved in his cloth placenta.
By using the image of a placenta as a metaphor for the English patient's fragility, Ondaatje heightens the image of the patient’s fetus-like nature. Because the patient is so badly burned, he relies on Hana—almost like a mother—to feed, wash, and take care of him. His blankets represent a placenta because they keep him in place, they keep him warm, and he is unable to move from their confines—like an unborn baby in the womb. This figurative image is particularly striking because the English patient is a grown adult; yet his injuries have reduced his physical capabilities almost to the point of elimination. His mind remains sharp, and he can recall memories of his past and communicate with Hana, but he remains entirely immobile. This metaphor also gestures to the gendered dynamic between Hana and the patient, for Hana—the novel's primary female character—has no choice but to tend to the male patient before she tends to herself.
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Chapter III. Sometime a Fire
Explanation and Analysis—A Drifting Star:
As Kip adjusts to life at the villa San Girolamo, he realizes that his racial identity will continue to negatively impact his relationships with Caravaggio, Hana, and the English patient—even though he will eventually spark a passionate romance with Hana. To heighten Kip's experience of isolation at the villa, Ondaatje crafts a metaphor for his non-belonging in Chapter 3 of the novel:
He seems casually content with this small group in the villa, some kind of loose star on the edge of their system. This is like a holiday for him after the war of mud and rivers and bridges. He enters the house only when invited in, just a tentative visitor, the way he had done that first night when he had followed the faltering sound of Hana’s piano and come up the cypress-lined path and stepped into the library.
Comparing Kip to a “loose star on the edge of their system" powerfully demonstrates the level of isolation Kip faces at the villa. This metaphorical statement—Kip is, of course, not a literal star in a solar system—illustrates the emotional and societal chasm between the villa's White Western inhabitants and Kip. Not only does Kip enter the orbit of the villa long after Hana and the others, but his turban (a physical sign of his Indian identity) and his British military uniform visually differentiate him from the others. However relieved Kip is to live away from "mud and rivers and bridges," the fact of his "otherness" remains—even though he feels pride at having fought for Britain during the war.
Bombs have largely destroyed the villa's hospital, but Hana, Caravaggio, and the English patient manage to reconstruct a loose system of social constructs. As Ondaatje's solar system metaphor indicates, Kip exists on the outside of this system and is thus akin to a loose star that circles the system but does not completely fit within its orbit. This image of non-belonging is integral to Kip’s character in the beginning of The English Patient, for it introduces to the reader dynamics of colonialism, racism, and exclusion present at the villa.
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Chapter IX. The Cave of Swimmers
Explanation and Analysis—Almásy's Transformation:
In Chapter 9 of The English Patient, the newly-revealed Almásy shares his entire history with Caravaggio—from his early days of exploration in the desert to his tumultuous romance with Katharine Clifton before World War II began. Although Caravaggio does not physically force Almásy to divulge his past, his pressures cause Almásy to feel taken advantage of—an experience Ondaatje illustrates with a metaphor:
You must talk to me, Caravaggio. Or am I just a book? Something to be read, some creature to be tempted out of a loch and shot full of morphine, full of corridors, lies, loose vegetation, pockets of stones.
Prior to this moment, Caravaggio suggests to Hana that Hana inject the English patient with additional doses of morphine, as an encouragement to share more of his history. Aware of Caravaggio's attempted manipulation, the English patient confronts Caravaggio for his treatment of the patient as a book or "something to be read." The metaphor of the English patient as a book connects to the larger theme of history and storytelling that The English Patient so heavily explores throughout its narrative. As much as the English patient treasures books and stories, he does not appreciate becoming one himself, for he feels that Caravaggio and others are using him simply for his wealth of knowledge. He receives little information about Caravaggio's life in return and exposes this irony with his interrogation of Caravaggio.
However, even when bed-bound with no control over how others approach him, Almásy harbors incredible mental and verbal capabilities, which this passage demonstrates through its breadth of figurative language. In The English Patient, knowledge, memory, and history are taken advantage of. Almásy’s memories are the keys to understanding his past—and the intertwined stories of his fellows at the villa—but war upsets the nature of memory, identity, and how humans approach them, as Almásy’s speech to Caravaggio demonstrates.
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