Textual, mnemonic, and physical gaps leave room in which identity is found through body and environment in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Toni Morrison's Jazz. Ondaatje's characters retrieve their absent personas by mutually colonizing...

Patterns of imagery, symbol and metaphor inform a reading of the novel as much as character or plot. Discuss with close reference to The English Patient.

Whilst the four main characters of The English Patient are extremely powerful, and important...

The English Patient has been referred to as "a poem disguised as a novel." Much emphasis is directed toward Michael Ondaatje's language, which "takes center stage, gliding and soaring, drifting into the hidden rooms of his character's souls,...

Who we are is shaped by where we are from.

This is a common thread in the human experience; our backgrounds give way to our personalities. But what happens when a person disagrees with the confines of their nation upon their identity? The English...

Immigrants often face social alienation and exclusion from the society they are trying to enter, causing them to feel powerless. In Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, it is shown that the hardships of entering a new cultural space cause an...

The central idea of Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion is the presentation of the marginalised voice, which is in keeping with his motivation to craft texts of post-colonial fiction. He offers an alternative version of events to reveal the...

The postmodernist novel In the Skin of a Lion, by Michael Ondaatje, is a convincing exploration of the complex nature of power and the impact of ethnocentric domination on different cultural groups. Though lending itself to a wide variety of...

Setting is an important part of Michael Ondaatje’s novel In the Skin of a Lion, symbolically underpinning the novel’s conceptual concerns. This narrative can be understood as a sweeping contemporary myth in which the setting works ironically and...

Someone who is individuated displays signs of maturity and responsibility, in addition to also having a good understanding about the different aspects of themselves and the inner workings of the universe which bestows a holistic healing effect on...

Shadowboxing, a series of short stories by Tony Birch follows the life of Michael Burn as he grows up in the inner suburbs of Melbourne in the 1960s. Michael Ondaatje's novel In the Skin of a Lion narrates the life of Canadian Patrick Lewis...

Throughout Ondaatje’s novel Anil's ghost, there are a multitude of allusions to an underlying theme of the struggle between the spiritual world and the physical. Ondaatje does a fantastic job in weaving these two world views into the singular...

In Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje uses motifs, syntax, and analogies in order to create a mythic Ceylon and convey his fragmented identity through the fate of history. By employing a sarcastic and ironic tone, he creates an analogy...

Throughout the novel Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, there are many occurrences of humans, mainly men, displaying their animalistic nature over their human nature that sets them apart from other animals, especially with one of the major...

In both Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje and The Lesser Blessed by Richard Van Camp, the male protagonist is deeply affected by a problem-drinking father. In The Lesser Blessed, Larry Sole’s father becomes physically and sexually abusive...

Ambiguous text, written in such a way that the wording can be interpreted with multiple meanings, is used regularly in literature as a means of creating deeper significance in the passage. This is demonstrated in the memoirs Teaching a Stone to...

In literature, different settings are often used to explain the production of different types of characters with varied opinions, personalities, and morals. On top of this, the setting is often used to carry a specific idea or emphasize the goal...

Few aspects of the world are as subjective and as complex as literature. The same piece of literature can take on a virtually infinite number of meanings based upon the interpretation of the individual. This idea has been expounded upon in several...