Explication of Madness in The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

All characters of this book are mad, but only by induction by the maddest one of them all: Hana. She is the constant, while all of the other characters are the variables. In the very beginning of the book, there is only an element of unspoken insanity when observing this character, as Ondaatje describes, “To Hana the wild gardens were like further rooms. She worked along the edges of them aware always of unexploded mines” (43). It is not until other characters start arriving that the externalization of this madness appears in other people. This explains why Hana is an inductive force of madness. It is arguable that madness is an internal affair, but with it, plot thickens. Hana has been afflicted by war, desensitized by death. “One night when one of the patients died she ignored all rules and took the pair of tennis shoes he had with him in his pack and put them on. They were slightly too big for her but she was comfortable” (Ondaatje 50). She is clinging to life by re-living the deaths of others. Polti’s seventeenth situation states that there must be a mad person and a victim, but in this case there are multiple victims.

The reason they are victims and not mere observers is because they are being sucked into Hana’s madness, both physically (Because they cannot persuade her to leave a heavily-mined area) and mentally (Because they are falling in love with her). An excellent example of a fusion of these attributes is the section of the Novel where Kip is defusing a mine inside a concrete ball. He can't decode it without help, and starts screaming for help, while Hana (Soon to be his lover) comes running out to help. Kip is stunned that Hana is so willing to help, but Ondaatje gives clues that Hana is actually suicidal, and has lost the essence of life. She wants the mine to explode, to kill them both in a cleansing wash of sanity, of death. After all, it is watching others die that was the cause of her insanity, so would not the opposite point of view elicit the opposite response? As it stands, Kip is the only character to escape this madness, leaving the house after his job is done. The parallel between a mad adventure and a precision job is remarkable. Kip rides the lightning for months, engaging to Hana’s insane core, while diffusing bombs by day. Ondaatje expresses this feeling of insanity perfectly as such: “Nurses too became shell-shocked from the dying around them. Or from something as small as a letter. They would carry a severed arm down a hall, or swab at blood that never stopped, as if the wound were a well, and they began to believe in nothing, trusted nothing. They broke the way a man dismantling a mine broke the second his geography exploded” (41). A graph of Kip's two personas would look like a line of his in-born sanity moving across the map in a straight, even line, while the line of his influenced insanity is darting in all directions, spiraling, going backwards, until finally meeting up with the line of sanity once more, when he leaves the villa. Personally, I think the only reason Kip came out of this is because he was the only previously unspent soul on the premises. Carravagio was incapacitated early on, “He raises his hands up as if to cup the quarter-moon. 'They removed both thumbs, Hana. See.'" (Ondaatje 54), and drowned his sorrow in Hana’s madness. The English Patient himself was too dazed and confused to understand what exactly what life was anymore.

This leads the Explication to the next point: What is Hana’s source of madness? Many clues draw towards this question, one of them being shell-shock. Desensitization is the cause of her dissonant common sense: “’I thought I was going to die. I wanted to die. And I thought if I was going to die I would die with you. Someone like you, young as I am, I saw so many dying near me in the last year” (Ondaatje 103). The English Patient is the manifestation of all of her loss. She cares for The English Patient much more than she cares for herself, which is another demonstration of the externalisation of her insanity: "'Now he's holed up in a Tuscan villa and the girl won't leave him. Simply refuses" (Ondaatje 29). I do not view The English Patient as a character himself, but rather as an oracle. He contributes only information to those who need it. Everyone accesses him at some point, but I believe this spurs the mutual madness into a tailspin, triggered by Hana. Later on, when Carravagio is pumping the English patient with morphine and interrogating him, Carravagio learns some frightening secrets. The information he provides is far too potent for the delicate existence of the other victims. Hana uses this oracle to keep her fire burning. He is the source of her madness, which she transcribes to others automatically just by keeping him alive. It is an impossible situation, because Hana is keeping the English patient alive in the way she couldn't for her father. She will never let it go because she feels she could give her life to repay the unknown debts to her father.

Another reason why Madness is the dramatic situation of the book is the lack of presence of any commonly-used theme or structure. This novel is extremely anti-archetypal because it explores the organic shapes of the human mind. There is little linearity regarding the thought-patterns of the characters in this novel. Ondaatje elicits this madness by tagging the reader as a part of the monotony, the boredom. He does this by describing very inane and pointless things as beautiful, full of life and meaning, which is exactly what a mad person would do if they were left to their own devices. "'I anted to touch that bone at your neck, collarbone, it's like a small hard wing under your skin. I wanted to place my fingers against it. I've always liked flesh the colour of rivers and rocks or like the brown eye of a Susan, do you know know what that flower is? Have you seen them? I am so tired, Kip, I want to sleep. I want to sleep under this tree, put my eye against your collarbone" (Ondaatje 103). Ondaatje allows the reader to fall under the influence of madness with the rest of them by showing the reader how to be amused by casual and bland things. He turns landscapes into stories and conversations into movies. This constitution is constant throughout the novel, and readers have to dig deep in order to find the commonly-found hero and the antagonist. The very structure of this book is a reflection of the mad mind.