Dissociating Traumatic Self : A Psychoanalytic Reading of Ondaatje’s The English Patient

Abstract

In Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, identity is reconstructed among four characters who are avoiding many lost aspects of their previous lives in an Italian villa during World War II. They need to escape the trauma created, their old identities, names, bodies, and places to begin anew. The reconstruction of identity takes place, regardless of the characters’ attempts to escape separate versions of their identities. The novel is mostly about resisting the Eurocentric view of the world, focusing on human relationships and human resilience. Eventually, after the bombs are dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, the English patient is assumed by the reader to die in the Italian villa. The surviving characters Kip, Hana, and Caravaggio decide to return to the countries where they were born, where they feel that they belong. This gives one explanation of how the reconstruction of identity takes place, regardless of the characters’ attempts to escape separate versions of their identities. The four characters have different reasons why their lives have led to the San Girolamo Villa, they are linked through World War II and their experience with trauma. According to Lois Tyson “individual identity and its cultural milieu inhabit, reflect, and define each other. Their relationship is mutually constitutive and dynamically unstable” (280). Creation of identity relies on culture as well as individual will and desire. In a sense, a complete individual self does not exist, because a subject’s identity is reconstructed through a collage of names, stereotypes, body image, the imagination, memories, relationships, environment, books, and “history.”