Literary Precedents for The English Patient

This Study Guide consists of approximately 70 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The English Patient.

Literary Precedents for The English Patient

This Study Guide consists of approximately 70 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The English Patient.
This section contains 373 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy The English Patient Study Guide

In his depiction of the human cost of modern warfare, Ondaatje has a precedent in Ernest Hemingway and, to a much lesser degree, Stephen Crane, who is mentioned in the book. There is also an echo of Hemingway and the modernists in the characters' disillusionment at the end of the war.

The importance and power of the past have been movingly explored in the works of William Faulkner. Sudden shifts in time and point-of-view, which Ondaatje uses quite effectively, can be found also in Faulkner's novels and short fiction.

Three of the great "desert" novels that bear on The English Patient are T. E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935; popularized as Lawrence of Arabia), Paul Bowles's The Sheltering Sky (1949), and Lawrence Durrell's The Alexandria Quartet (1957-1960; see separate entry).

To find another book with the deft poetic imagery of The English Patient we would have to...

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This section contains 373 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy The English Patient Study Guide
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