The English Patient (Summary) Essay, Research Paper

In the final year of World War II, in a bomb-damaged villa in the hills north ofFlorence, four characters seek shelter and in their various ways attempt to undo thedamage of the war. Kip, the Indian munitions expert, by day disarms unexploded minesand bombs. The title character, badly burned all over his body when his plane crashed inthe desert, lies in a bed, morphine deadening his pain and loosening his memory,reminiscing about a love affair and his career in military intelligence as a desert expert. The young Canadian nurse Hana, emotionally shut down as the result of her workin the war and the death of her lover, has refused to withdraw with her unit and lovinglytends to the English patient and develops an intimate and sensual though sexually chasterelation with Kip. Caravaggio, a friend of Hana’s parents and with an ambiguous interest in

her, dips into Hana’s supply of morphine and uses his intelligence skills to steal things forthe group and also to probe into the mystery of the history and identity of the “English”patient. The novel ends shortly after radio news of the dropping of atomic bombs inHiroshima and Nagasaki drives Kip away from the company of the companions he seeswith angry irony as part of a destructive “Western wisdom” (p. 284). Hana’s deep caring is given without knowledge of the identity of thewounded man, who, it turns out, has, like many a spy, subverted the divisiveness ofnationality and patriotism by working both sides in the war. The patient’s love of thedesert adds resonance to this theme, the desert being to him the place that defies nationalboundaries and allows those it attracts “to be their best selves, unconscious of ancestry”(p. 246).