The English Patient

“This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.”

This quote emphasizes the importance of literature and Storytelling as a Form of Healing in the text. Hana treats books like methods of escape, from both the mundane quality of everyday life and the violence of war. Later, Katharine will treat literature in a very similar way.

“They were protected here by the simple fact that the villa seemed a ruin. But she felt safe here, half adult and half child.”

In this quote, both Hana and the villa are liminal in nature: The villa looks like a ruin from the outside, but is still habitable, and Hana looks like an adult but still has one foot in childhood.

“When I was lost among them, unsure of where I was, all I needed was the name of a small ridge, a local custom, a cell of this historical animal, and a map of the world would slide into place.”

Here, the English patient reveals how deeply he relied on modern European mapping practices to navigate unfamiliar landscapes. These are the impulses and habits that will be challenged throughout the novel, particularly as characters struggle to understand their national identity and develop self-awareness.

“Maybe this is the way to come out of a war, he thinks. A burned man to care for, some sheets to wash in the fountain, a room painted like a garden.”

As Caravaggio reflects on what it means to recover from trauma, he connects the healing process to both everyday tasks (washing sheets) and extraordinary, unusual situations (caring for a terribly burned man). In other words, at the beginning of his own healing journey, he is willing to try anything that might work.

“The day seems to have no order until these times, which are like a ledger for her, her body full of stories and situations.”

Here, Hana reflects on her practice of collecting fragments from her day after getting into bed at night. The simile in which she is compared to a “ledger” emphasizes her habit of organizing and evaluating those fragments. This passage also underscores the thematic importance of Storytelling as a Form of Healing by demonstrating how a story might be put together.

“The war is not over everywhere, she was told. The war is over. This war is over. The war here. She was told it would be like desertion. This is not desertion.”

Hana recounts the conversation she had with some other nurses when she decided to stay at the villa. The short sentences in this passage underscore the tension of conversations about things like war and desertion. The passage also suggests that Hana was thinking about war differently than other nurses may have been, which is apparent in the slight variations in their language (“the war” versus “this war,” for example).

“The deepest sorrow, he thought. Where the only way to survive is to excavate everything.”

Here, Caravaggio watches Hana sob in the kitchen. He does not know what she is crying about, but his belief that healing requires one to “excavate” one’s past reflects the novel’s thematic interest in Storytelling as a Form of Healing and history.

“As if he was preparing himself, as if he wanted to slip into his own death by imitating its climate and light.”

Hana has just observed the English patient asleep on his back, holding a lit candle on his chest. This moment draws attention to the novel’s interest in death and grief, but it does so by implying that death and grief are things that can be practiced. Hana finds this bothersome, clearly hoping to keep death at bay for as long as possible, but the English patient has a different relationship with loss than she does.

“He pulleyed himself across to her face, his Queen of Sadness, and his brown hand reached out small against the giant neck.”

Here, Kip visits the fresco depicting the Queen of Sheba in the church at Arezzo for the last time. Not only does this passage emphasize his love of visual art, but the smallness of his “brown hand” against the woman’s neck mirrors the smallness of the colonial subject made marginal by imperial violence and the erasure of non-Western cultures, invoking National Identity and Personal Identity.

“A face which in the darkness looked more like someone he knew. A sister. Someday a daughter.”

As Kip looks at a statue of the Virgin Mary, he sees something familiar in her face. This passage suggests that people from far-flung parts of the world are not actually very different from each other, underscoring shared, communal experiences of things like family and religion.

“The landscape around him is just a temporary thing, there is no permanence to it.”

Kip sees the Italian landscape around the villa as impermanent in the same way the English patient appreciates the desert because it seems impermanent. Thus the two characters are connected through their perception of temporariness.

“I thought to myself, We have this villa this grass, we should have lain down together, you in my arms, before we died. I wanted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone, it’s like a small hard wing under your skin.”

After helping Kip disarm the large bomb near the villa, Hana processes her fear of dying, which was actually a wish to die in Kip’s arms, invoking the theme of Desire, Sensuality, and Orientalism. Her description of them lying in the field together is reminiscent of the English patient lying with Katharine in the Cave of Swimmers. Additionally, her attraction to Kip’s collarbone echoes the English patient’s fondness for Katharine’s neck. In this sense, Hana and the English patient become increasingly paralleled in this moment.

“He found out he had the skill of the three-dimensional gaze, the rogue gaze that could look at an object or page of information and realign it, see all the false descants.”

Reflecting on his ability to analyze visual information, Kip calls his perception “rogue,” which emphasizes his otherness among not only the white residents of the villa, but the white soldiers serving in his unit. This passage also connects Kip to the English patient, as both are, at one time in their lives, fond of mapping, labeling, and containing data.

“He had lived through a time of war when everything offered up to those around him was a lie. He had felt like a man in the darkness of a room imitating the calls of a bird.”

This passage, in which Caravaggio reflects on his skill in deception, highlights the novel’s interest in how people form and understand their own National Identity and Personal Identity. It also gestures toward the idea of truth and reality: For Caravaggio, and for all the characters who lived through the war, reality is an elusive concept. By using a simile to compare Caravaggio to a bird, this passage emphasizes Caravaggio’s ability to fly away from any situation quickly without looking back.

“As they grow intimate the space between them during the day grows larger. She likes the distance he leaves her, the space he assumes is their right.”

After Hana and Kip become lovers, he interacts with her less during the day and in front of the others, but Hana likes this because it makes their relationship feel like a secret, reflecting Desire, Sensuality, and Orientalism. In this sense, Hana and Kip’s dynamic echoes that of the English patient and Katharine, but it also inverts that dynamic: For the English patient and Katharine, the necessary secrecy became toxic and ultimately destroyed them.

“All of us, even those with European homes and children in the distance, wished to remove the clothing of our countries. It was a place of faith. We disappeared into the landscape.”

Here, the English patient describes the desert as a place in which Europeans can become nationless, reflecting the theme of National Identity and Personal Identity. He also sees the desert as a place of religious belief and implies that there is something spiritually transcendent about being able to shed connections to any particular country.

“But we were interested in how our lives could mean something to the past. We sailed into the past. We were young. We knew power and great finance were temporary things.”

The goal of the Royal Geographical Society, according to the English patient, was to connect to the past rather than leave a legacy for the future. He thus connects the desert again to impermanence, arguing that he and his fellow cartographers were interested in something that transcended material wealth and influence.

“Instead he put his right arm forward and drew it in a gesture across her bare neck so her skin was touched by the whole length of his damp forearm.”

The first time the English patient touches Katharine, his gesture foreshadows both his love of her neck and her tragic death. By leaving his sweat on her skin, he connects this gesture (and ultimately, their sexual intimacy) to the desert.

“This is my shoulder, he thinks, not her husband’s, this is my shoulder. As lovers they have offered parts of their bodies to each other, like this.”

This passage highlights the novel’s tendency to connect romantic love to both physicality and ownership. The English patient’s rumination over the fact that his shoulder belongs to him echoes his statement to Katharine that what he hates most is ownership and his paradoxical sense of possession over her.

“Some thieves are collectors, like some of the explorers you scorn, like some men with women or some women with men. But Caravaggio was not like that. He was too curious and generous to be a successful thief.”

Here, Hana says that Caravaggio is fundamentally different from the type of expeditioners who would steal land or the type of person who would claim ownership over another person. Since she is saying this to the English patient, who was both a colonial explorer and possessive over a woman, she seems to be offering a subtle critique of these tendencies. She also draws attention to Caravaggio’s human traits, which have made him a mediocre thief.

“The self-sufficiency and privacy Hana saw in him later were caused not just by his being a sapper in the Italian campaign. It was as much as result of being the anonymous member of another race, a part of the invisible world.”

After Lord Suffolk’s death, Kip learned to close himself off emotionally to other people as a form of self-protection. As Hana learns, this habit also reflects his presence as an Indian soldier in a largely white army, in which invisibility and anonymity are simultaneously beneficial and painful due to the complications of National Identity and Personal Identity.

“He moves always in relation to things, beside walls, raised terrace hedges. He scans the periphery. When he looks at Hana he sees a fragment of her lean cheek in relation to the landscape behind it.”

Kip’s tendency to move in relation to other people and objects speaks to his membership in a colonized race: White people, including Hana, see him only for the ways he can benefit them and not for who he is as a whole person. This seems to have influenced how he moves and perceives both himself and the outside world.

“We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees, fears we have hidden in as if caves.”

As he carries Katharine’s body out of the cave, the English patient reflects on the nature of death, specifically on which memories and experiences are marked on the body after death. This echoes the novel’s interest in death and loss as well as its interest in Storytelling as a Form of Healing. The many similes in this sentence emphasize the literary nature of the passage, reminding the reader of the constructed nature of stories.