Borders Crossing

Abstract

The aim of this essay is to elucidate the complexity of textual appropriation in a post-colonial text by examining how that textual strategy is practiced by Michael Ondaatje in The English Patient. In this novel, I suggest, Ondaatje's inquiry into borders (textual, cultural or geographical) depends on appropriation for its literal method. At once inscribing and negotiating, appropriation stands in for the writer's anxiety and sincerity when faced with the weight of written tradition, the characters' equivocation when faced with the conundrum of the world war (love and loss, memory and absence), and for the text's problematic stance vis-a-vis its own narrative pretensions and aspirations.