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Imagery
Explanation and Analysis—Hallucination:
After Kip leaves the villa in Chapter 10 of The English Patient, intent on shedding himself of all Western influence and culture, the English patient remains in Italy surrounded with memories and guilt over his ties with English colonialism. During the middle of one night, the English patient wakes up and appears to see the shadow of Kip standing in his room—a hallucination Ondaatje heightens with the use of imagery:
Around three a.m. he feels a presence in the room. He sees, for a pulse of a moment, a figure at the foot of his bed, against the wall or painted onto it perhaps, not quite discernible in the darkness of foliage beyond the candlelight. He mutters something, something he had wanted to say, but there is silence and the slight brown figure, which could be just a night shadow, does not move.
In this passage, the English patient is clearly hallucinating, for Kip has left the villa and is unlikely to return. However, the English patient, aware of the literal and symbolic blood on the hands of his Western people, feels guilt for the way his people have treated non-White Easterners like Kip. The English patient not only feels guilt for colonialist actions before and during World War II, but particularly after he discovers that the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the events that trigger Kip's attempted murder of the patient. Ondaatje uses powerful imagery to capture the patient’s sense of disorientation as he “feels," “sees," and “mutters” into the dark room. The use of these action verbs engages the reader’s senses, appealing to the sense of sight (or lack thereof in this case) and the sense of touch.
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