can someone discuss several of the moments where healing occurs in the english patient?
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The English Patient Study Guide
The English Patient study guide contains a biography of Michael Ondaatje, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.
The English Patient tracks the convocation of four people at an Italian villa - a nurse, a Sikh sapper, a thief, and a badly burned Englishman - who come to forge an unlikely family, and together discover the secrets of their respective pasts, and the emotional wounds they share.
Hana tends to the burned English patient in a room of their Italian villa. The nurse asks him how he was wounded, and he replies that he "fell burning into the desert" from a plane. His plane crashed in the Sand Sea, and nomadic Bedouins saw him stand up naked from the burning plane, on fire. They saved him, but he had no memory of who he is: after the accident, he knew only that he was English. At night the patient rarely sleeps, so the nurse reads to him from…
Read the full The English Patient Summary
- The English Patient Summary
- About The English Patient
- Character List
- Glossary of Terms
- Major Themes
- Summary and Analysis of Chapter 1
- Summary and Analysis of Chapter 2
- Summary and Analysis of Chapter 3
- Summary and Analysis of Chapters 4-5
- Summary and Analysis of Chapter 6
- Summary and Analysis of Chapters 7-8
- Summary and Analysis of Chapters 9-10
- Almasy and the Desert
- Related Links on The English Patient
- Suggested Essay Questions
- Test Yourself! - Quiz 1
- Test Yourself! - Quiz 2
- Test Yourself! - Quiz 3
- Test Yourself! - Quiz 4
- Author of ClassicNote and Sources
The English Patient Essays and Related Content
- The English Patient: Major Themes
- The English Patient: Essays
- The English Patient: Questions
- The English Patient: Purchase the Novel and Related Material
- Michael Ondaatje: Biography
Hi, I've been set this essay question "What is the role and influence of the desert in the novel?" Any ideas?!
What does this mean? "... so his face is almost at his hip, ..."
"He ambles naked up the stairs to the second floor, where the guards are, bending down to laugh at some privacy, so his face is almost at his hip, nudging the guards about his evening’s invitation, alfresco, was that it? Or seduction a cappella~? ""his face is almost at his hip", does"his hip" mean the naked man's hip? But, how can his face at his own hip? I mean, the hip is under our back, while our faces are on the other side. How to explain this"his face is almost at his hip"?
alfresco : it must be a kind of metaphor. This word means at outside. Does that whole sentence mean," about his evening's alfresco invitation"?
Or a cappella seduction?
" Half a year earlier, from a window at the end of the long hall in Santa Chiara Hospital in Pisa, Hana had been able to see a white lion. At midnight she would look through the window and know it stood within the curfew blackout and that it would emerge like her into the dawn shift. "
Does it mean the lion stood within darkness(for the street lamps or something were blackout?)
And what does " emerge like her "mean , another metaphor?
