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A summary of Chapter I in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of The English Patient and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans.
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Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient Chapter Summary. Find summaries for every chapter, including a The English Patient Chapter Summary Chart to help you understand the book.
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- Plot summary
- Story
- Synopsis
- Plot
In The English Patient, the past and the present are continually intertwined. The narrative structure intersperses descriptions of present action with thoughts and conversations that offer glimpses of past events and occurrences. Though there is no single narrator, the story is alternatively seen from the point of view of each of the main character...
The novel opens with Hana, a young nurse, gardening outside a villa in Italy in 1945. The European theater of the war has just ended with the Germans retreating up the Italian countryside. As the Germans retreated, they left hidden bombs and mines everywhere, so the landscape is particularly dangerous. Although the other nurses and patients have le...
One day, a man with bandaged hands named Caravaggio arrives at the villa. He is an old family friend of Hana's father, Patrick, and had heard about her location while he was recovering in a hospital a few miles away. In Canada, where Caravaggio knew Hana years ago, he was a thief. He tells her how his skills were legitimized in the war and how he p...
Little by little, the English patient tells this whole story. Caravaggio, who has suspected the English patient was not really English, has his suspicions confirmed. He fills in gaps for the Almasy, telling him that Geoffrey Clifton was really an agent of British Intelligence and that Intelligence had known about Almasy and Katharine's affair the w...
Kip has felt emotionally removed from everyone in his job as a sapper. When he meets Hana, he uses her to once again connect to humanity. All the residents of the villa celebrate Hana's twenty-first birthday, and Kip grows comfortable as her lover. When August comes, however, Kip hears on the radio of the atomic bomb that the United States has drop...
- Michael Ondaatje
- 1992
A quick-reference summary: The English Patient on a single page. The English Patient: Detailed Summary & Analysis In-depth summary and analysis of every chapter of The English Patient .
Active Themes. The English patient can never sleep at night, so Hana finds a book in the library and reads to him. If it is cold, she climbs into bed with him, careful not to touch him, and reads late into the night. He listens to Hana’s voice in the candlelight, “swallowing her words like water.”.
Chapter I. Hana stands up in the garden near the orchard of a villa and heads in the direction of the house. She walks through the kitchen and up the dark stairs to a back bedroom that is painted like a garden. In the bed is a badly burned man, and he turns to look at Hana as she enters the room.
Study Guide. Overview. The English Patient, a 1992 novel by Michael Ondaatje, is a work of historical fiction that explores themes of love, war, and identity.
