My Favourite Line in this entire book is as follows: 'In darkness, in any light after dusk, you can slit a vein and the blood is black'. I believe that dusk represents the point of no return in depression, and the make-up of the soul becomes dark and colourless. This is a powerful line to say so early in the book, and is a slight foreshadowing of the tone to ensue. Not only this, but it is the characters' reflection to the grim acts of war they endure which highlight the melancholy. Needless to say, Hana is mentally 'affected', and would do well with some rehabilitation. The problem is, she is trapped inside the maw of a threshing memory. She is mentally ground after each passing day just by living in her own personally haunted house. Firstly, the very walls of the villa are what should remind her of the nightmare of duty as a military nurse. As if the sights and smells are not enough, she is still caring for the English patient, which puts her into a spiral of insanity. Her fate is clearly not self-designated, as she allows her personality to drift from extreme to extreme. Then Kip arrives. Things looked grim before, but seeing someone who is so readily-able to ignore serious problems with themselves in favour of a crutch or a quick-patch is a red flag for psychotic behaviour.
Two excerpts I liked from this book that also support Hana's psycho-analysis were these: '"Soldiers were coming in with just bits of their bodies, falling in love with me for an hour and then dying"' and: '"I leaned forward to close a dead soldier's eyes, and then he opened them and sneered, "Can't wait to have me dead? You bitch!" He sat up and swept everything on my tray to the floor."' These speak for themselves. Hana was heavily mistreated, and has internalized everything to the point of eerie silence. These harsh memories of hers are like shrapnel going off in her brain, warping and slicing and severing memories and blurring the line of what is real and what is desired and what is eternal. I think Hana's grey past has entwined itself as the very fibre of her conscience, woven firmly into interlocking habits of memory. She is restricted only to the English patient because of what she has been changed by. Change is difficult to most people, impossible for people affected like Hana. But the change that twisted Hana is constant, consistant, familiar, comfortable (in ignorance) and devitalizing. It is like riding a downdraft.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Ondaatje the novelist is a brilliant challenge to any reader. His prose voice is never very far from his poetic voice. There is an energy to English words that is generally strong and somewhat angular--our language is not lyrical like Italian, for instance. And yet Ondaatje seems able to make it float and sing like no other author I have read.
Post a Comment